However, scientists must, if they are competent and sincere in their convictions, be opposed to any form of Faith. Faith cannot be experimentally tested/falsified, and therefore has no place in rational thought.
But science is itself mostly faith! Think about it: If I am, for example, a biologist who specializes in the endocrine system, then there is a massive layer of physics and chemistry that underlies everything that I study and analyze. Further, as the endocrine system is inexorably linked with about a million other complex systems in mammals, then my work also depends on the validity of all the work done in those areas as well.
And so as an expert in a field like this, I would have to take on faith that most of these systems work as they are described to me so that I can have valid expectations and conduct reasonable experiments. They may have been described to me in a high school or college classroom, or from a book I read, or whatever, but at some level I am not going to derive my work in my science from fundamental principles in physics (which are, in themselves a sort of fundamenalism) - it would take more than my own lifetime and I wouldn't have time to do my work in the first place.
I have no problem with rational thought, but the idea that science doesn't include faith confounds me. Sure it doesn't have to include faith in a God, but it requires faith in some ideas about how the universe works.
And on a side note, I'm a software developer, not a biologist - don't make any assumptions:)
The opposite of this view is religion. All religions place some questions beyond the pale. Christians are not allowed to question the divinity of Jesus. Jews are not allowed to question their special relationship with God. Muslims are not allowed to question the unity of God. None of them are allowed to question the existence of God in the form of any serious doubt.
This attitude is a religion in itself - and your generalizations are basically based on observations of religion based purely on the media or by listening to others like yourself. Instead of going to the real sources, you're using the very tools that religious fanatics blame for being the downfall of our society. Ironic.
Many, MANY forms of christianity encourage the questioning of the divinity of Jesus - the hope is obviously that you'll ultimately agree, but many believe you don't have true faith unless you can truly question it, and still believe. I won't even get into Judaism of Islam.
What I find the most disappointing about this whole debate is the rash generalizations people use to describe the "other side" - like saying "Christians are against evolution" and so forth.
It's like saying that all geeks are hackers, or that all hackers are criminals, or even that all geeks prefer C++. None of these statements are valid. And it is not because there is some small exception to some general rule. I'm guessing that most programmers do not in fact prefer C++ and instead have a great variation in language preference.
Then what do you do after you de-prioritize them? I think its easy to say, but you're not thinking about the consequences... what happens NEXT? where do those kids go? What is their role in their school when they are deprioritized in favor of the minority of high performing students?
Boy, if you think a high performing kid has issues when he's "persecuted", what do you think an underperformer is going to do? I can tell you he's not going to hole himself up in his bedroom and write open source software.
As I understand it you're close, but not quite there. Its not an expense or an income per say, but a debt owed to the owner of the option. As a result, the options should be recorded in the "Liabilities" section of the accounting statement that every public company must release quarterly. So before when a company said it had $1 million in liabilities (debt), now it might say that based on the current value of the stock, it has $1.2 million: $1 million of specific debt to whoever they would have recorded normally, and $0.2 million in debt that the company might have to pay if people cashed out their stock options on that day.
So for instance, if I am granted 1000 options at $10 and this quarter the stock closed at $15, then on that day, the company "owes" me $5000 - meaning if I cash out my stock options on that day, then the value is paid out to me essentially by the company.
On the other hand, if the stock closes at $8 on the day the quarter ends, then I would be a fool to cash out my options, so the company owes me nothing and I owe them nothing. So the extra liabilities there are $0.
There's no need to predict future value of options. Options have a very specific value depending on the exact price of the stock.
On a related note, I'm curious how companies actually fund the value of options. The company could end up buying those options on the open market on the day they issue them to you (buying them cheaply and thus playing the risk that the stock price actually goes up) or they may buy them at the moment you exercise them - essentially funding the entire value of your options. I dunno.
Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM?
on
Mozilla's Mini-Me
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm not about to say that Mozilla isn't a resource hog.
However, lets at least take things into perspective. When you browsed the web with 32MB of RAM (hey, so did I) it was with "HTML 1.0" and small images.. remember back when web pages had mostly text, grey backgrounds, and a few pictures here and there?
These days we have: - JavaScript - a full fledged interpreted language - the DOM - complete read/write live access to the current document's structure - CSS, which involves applying complex matching of style to document fragments and formatting of those fragments, - new layout concepts like absolute and relative positining, floats, etc - vastly more complex layout due to interactions of HTML rules and CSS rules - plugins - XML - support for JPEG, PNG, animated GIFs - HTTP 1.1 with reusable connections, pipelining, compression, smarter but more complex caching, and more
And thats the short list. And as much as you might say "that's just fluff! That's not the core of the web" you'd sure be complaining if your web browser didn't support all that.
The web is a lot more complex than it once was. You can't harken back to the days of Mosaic without realizing all the technologies that go into a modern web browser.
Andreesen had nothing to do with the freeing of the mozilla codebase. Credit that to a man named Frank Hecker, who was I think a high level tech evangelist at Netscape. He still appears every once in a while in open source circles... Frank was always the driving force behind freeing the lizard, not Marc.
oh please. Andreesen is a tool. He was a guy in the right place at the right time and the presse jumped all over him for being an internet visionary. He was just another geek at UIUC until Jim Clark took him and his friends and said "Lets make a product out of your Mosaic"
Now granted, this whole www-revolution might not have happened if the press didn't have SOME geek posterboy to drool over, but I have yet to see any evidence that Andreesen is any more visionary than any other C programmer.
If you threw me up in front of the press, I might make a bunch of forecasts about the future that sounded exciting too. Like him, I'd probably also tout a bunch of technology or trends that I knew nothing about. Lets not forget his fleeting interest in nanotechnology, or how LoudCloud was going to be the most successful web services company EVER.. not to mention his praising of Microsoft some years back.
Ok, so I got my playstation2 a few years ago, and I love perusing screenshots of the latest games online, thinking to myself "Wow, if only I had time to immerse myself in THAT!"
So its really hard for me to justify dropping $50 on a game that I know I'll only get to play for 5-10 hours in a month. And I know that about 50% of the time, I get bored or stuck in a game before finishing it.
My solution is to put the games in my amazon "save for later" queue and check back periodically as the games get cheaper and cheaper, and become available via the "used" channels. When I can get a game for $20 or less, I buy it. The disadvantage of this is that I usually have to wait a good 4-5 months before games are this cheap, and by then I've seen 5 other games that I'm drooling over at that moment.
A model like this would help serve my "that looks cool right now!" urge, but I wonder about the monthly-installment type of thing. When I do get bored/stuck, it is after about a month of gameplay. I might be willing to pony up $5 or $10 during that first month to buy the next installment or two early, while the game still has my attention... especially if I started the game for free. My net cost could be lower and I'd probably get the same enjoyment out of it..
Thanks for all the great responses folks! Sounds like an 83 or 83+ is what I want - I wasn't sure if there was a lot of difference in the way the "UI" (i.e. buttons) worked between the different models.
And yes, I'm going to be a high school teacher, this student teaching is the last step in the process...
I'm kind of half kidding, half serious with my first answer: in this day and age, kids want and instantaneous result. They don't want to spend 30 minutes graphing a complex function (or even x^2) at all, especially if there is a faster alternative. Besides, they've done that already in Algebra I.
But more seriously, its easy for those of us who have long been out of Algebra II to think that most kids have the patience and interest to continue to graph functions by hand when they've been doing it for at least a year or two... sure, us math geeks might like that but most kids will get the big picture stuff but get easily hung up on details. As the functions get more complex, the details just get hairier, and the actual concepts being learned are lost.
Basically, imagine you've never seen a sine wave before. Would you rather try to graph sin(1), sin(2), sin(3), etc by hand and get a bunch of random points, or would you like someone to say "here's how to graph sin(x) now lets figure out what makes it look that way, where the peaks and valleys are, etc"?
So I'm starting as a student teacher in about 2 weeks for a high school Algebra II course.. the course lives and dies by its box of TI-83's.. I'd like to buy a personal TI-xx so I can hack around with it at home..
I suppose I could just go buy a TI-83 Plus, but I wanted to see if anyone had any particular recommendations....
When I was in school all we had were these crappy Casio gfx-7000 calulators - I've never owned a TI, so frankly I can't figure out the difference between the 83, 86, 89, etc...
Being a student (and future teacher) I don't have a lot of money.. so what matters most to me is price, but I'm willing to spend an extra $10 or $20 if there is some key, awesome feature I would get by buying another model.. but at the same time, I want the basic operation to be as close to a TI-83 as possible.
oh, yes, the reason mozilla hasn't been ported is because there are other browsers.
It couldn't possibly be because the amiga is a dead platform and the 42 users out there haven't figured out how to write software for a platform made in the last 10 years.
Look, I hate flamewars as much as the next guy, but come ON! This is the amiga for cripes sake.
I actually live in California (maybe that explains my crazy leftist attitude about the 'downtrodden':)) and I don't pay any extra tax on stuff that I order out of state.
As for people who can't afford $20 a month - there are a lot out there. Don't forget too that you need a computer ($200-1000, depending on how much you know about computers - the less you know, the more you'll probably end up paying) - that initial investment is steep when you're making some $30,000 a year.
Don't assume that your social circle is representitive of the US.
There's a difference between "was online last year" and "has enough internet access to shop online" - I might have been able to get online once a week last year to check my e-mail, but that doesn't mean I've got dialup at home or a job that gives me free internet access.
the quoted statistics only prove my point - that almost half the US population (though, since when was 104 million adults considered 'more than half' of the population of a 300M person country?) don't have access to the tax-shelter that is online shopping. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what seperates those with internet access and those without. I'll give you a clue: its not what color car they drive.
And so no, I'm not a 'lonely crusader for the downtrodden' A crusader I may be, but I'm not lonely, nor is half the population of the US 'downtrodden' - take a peek outside your socioeconomic class, you might learn something!
They should have been doing this all along.. internet access has always been something that has been accessible only to the people who can afford the luxury of a dialup ISP or even broadband. Those are the people that should be taxed, not the people whose income dictates that they must shop locally. If anything the lack of tax has been a form of discount to consumers who make a certain minimum income.
its sort of like, "If you can afford $20+ a month, you get a discount on purchases as long as you use the internet to make them!"
Granted more and more people are getting online and it is becoming more and more affordable to the general public, but still not everyone has internet access, and not everyone can afford to get online to do their shopping!
Heh. Well learn something new every day. between this and a few of the other posts I've finally come to understand what this means!
Its amazing that it takes some slashdot posts to actually get this information. All the "traditional" financial information sources (CBS Marketwatch, CNN/Money, etc) couldn't explain it in a way that made sense to me:)
... also responsible for headlines such as "Prez Looks Bushed"
this guys article has no data to back up his flaming claims. Yes, AOL is a behemoth who's stock has tanked, but the fact is that earnings growth bested the economy's growth, and the $54b "loss" is a direct result of the stock tanking, not the other way around. the $54b "charge" was not paid to anyone, it was lost value in market cap.
This is like me (who knows nothing about sports) spelling doom for the Boston Red Sox because three of their players are injured. Not only would that claim be absurd, but I don't even know what I'm talking about when I make claims about sports teams.
And yes, I'm an AOL Time Warner employee at Netscape (since before the AOL/Netscape merger!) and I'm not happy about the situation, but I get so sick and tired of 'analysis' of the company made by idiots who know nothing about the subject they're analyzing, and are just looking for something else to rant about.
Mozilla successfully switched to autoconf a few years ago, and it has made porting much easier. we have a very extensive autoconf system...check out all the ports we do now, thanks in part to autoconf
Mozilla Ports
This is simply not true...nobody is translating mozilla to C and running it, and there is no faction within the mozilla community which is pushing to use C. Long ago there were a number of C-only advocates working at Netscape (jwz as an example) but they are no longer there.
The C++ portability guidelines are just that: _portability_ _guidelines_. The primary goal is to make it work on as many compilers as possible, and they are guidelines not rules. There are some platforms which, to this day, do not support anything beyond the simplest C++ templates.
Mozilla makes extensive use of templates with their nsCOMPtr class, but this particular class has been well tested on many platforms, and has many conditional #ifdef's which handle the broken compilers. But this is one major class for which the usefulness outweighed the maintenance costs. If the Mozilla team had to maintain 100 different constantly-changing template classes on 20 different compilers each with their own quirks, it would be a nightmare.
Since Sony will be using a Netscape-branded version of mozilla, they will have full CSS1/2, DOM1/2, etc... they're not using the braindead 4.x!
I also would highly doubt they would use Netscape 6 since mozilla has progressed so far since then..
XPCOM is completely independant from Windows' COM. the reason for the file size difference is the compilers. Part of this is that Microsoft simply makes a better compiler on Windows than gcc is on Linux. The other part is that gcc and ld do not properly truly unused strip symbols from binaries when a link is done.
try it - take a large set of XP code, and build a dll on each platform. the linux.so will be 30-60% larger than the windows.dll.
Slashdot Mirror
Then read slashdot!
"Programmation" isn't even a word.
"Take a deep breathe?"
No thanks, I think I'll go loose my mind instead.
However, scientists must, if they are competent and sincere in their convictions, be opposed to any form of Faith. Faith cannot be experimentally tested/falsified, and therefore has no place in rational thought.
:)
But science is itself mostly faith! Think about it: If I am, for example, a biologist who specializes in the endocrine system, then there is a massive layer of physics and chemistry that underlies everything that I study and analyze. Further, as the endocrine system is inexorably linked with about a million other complex systems in mammals, then my work also depends on the validity of all the work done in those areas as well.
And so as an expert in a field like this, I would have to take on faith that most of these systems work as they are described to me so that I can have valid expectations and conduct reasonable experiments. They may have been described to me in a high school or college classroom, or from a book I read, or whatever, but at some level I am not going to derive my work in my science from fundamental principles in physics (which are, in themselves a sort of fundamenalism) - it would take more than my own lifetime and I wouldn't have time to do my work in the first place.
I have no problem with rational thought, but the idea that science doesn't include faith confounds me. Sure it doesn't have to include faith in a God, but it requires faith in some ideas about how the universe works.
And on a side note, I'm a software developer, not a biologist - don't make any assumptions
The opposite of this view is religion. All religions place some questions beyond the pale. Christians are not allowed to question the divinity of Jesus. Jews are not allowed to question their special relationship with God. Muslims are not allowed to question the unity of God. None of them are allowed to question the existence of God in the form of any serious doubt.
This attitude is a religion in itself - and your generalizations are basically based on observations of religion based purely on the media or by listening to others like yourself. Instead of going to the real sources, you're using the very tools that religious fanatics blame for being the downfall of our society. Ironic.
Many, MANY forms of christianity encourage the questioning of the divinity of Jesus - the hope is obviously that you'll ultimately agree, but many believe you don't have true faith unless you can truly question it, and still believe. I won't even get into Judaism of Islam.
What I find the most disappointing about this whole debate is the rash generalizations people use to describe the "other side" - like saying "Christians are against evolution" and so forth.
It's like saying that all geeks are hackers, or that all hackers are criminals, or even that all geeks prefer C++. None of these statements are valid. And it is not because there is some small exception to some general rule. I'm guessing that most programmers do not in fact prefer C++ and instead have a great variation in language preference.
Then what do you do after you de-prioritize them? I think its easy to say, but you're not thinking about the consequences... what happens NEXT? where do those kids go? What is their role in their school when they are deprioritized in favor of the minority of high performing students?
Boy, if you think a high performing kid has issues when he's "persecuted", what do you think an underperformer is going to do? I can tell you he's not going to hole himself up in his bedroom and write open source software.
He was the scourge of the mozilla project until he finally left in a huff.
He's a whiner and a complainer who thinks that the concept of compromise is an exercise for the weak. Put simply, he doesn't live in the real world.
I could write 69 reasons that any software sucks, that doesn't mean I'm someone who deserves a story on slashdot.
As I understand it you're close, but not quite there. Its not an expense or an income per say, but a debt owed to the owner of the option. As a result, the options should be recorded in the "Liabilities" section of the accounting statement that every public company must release quarterly. So before when a company said it had $1 million in liabilities (debt), now it might say that based on the current value of the stock, it has $1.2 million: $1 million of specific debt to whoever they would have recorded normally, and $0.2 million in debt that the company might have to pay if people cashed out their stock options on that day.
So for instance, if I am granted 1000 options at $10 and this quarter the stock closed at $15, then on that day, the company "owes" me $5000 - meaning if I cash out my stock options on that day, then the value is paid out to me essentially by the company.
On the other hand, if the stock closes at $8 on the day the quarter ends, then I would be a fool to cash out my options, so the company owes me nothing and I owe them nothing. So the extra liabilities there are $0.
There's no need to predict future value of options. Options have a very specific value depending on the exact price of the stock.
On a related note, I'm curious how companies actually fund the value of options. The company could end up buying those options on the open market on the day they issue them to you (buying them cheaply and thus playing the risk that the stock price actually goes up) or they may buy them at the moment you exercise them - essentially funding the entire value of your options. I dunno.
I'm not about to say that Mozilla isn't a resource hog.
However, lets at least take things into perspective. When you browsed the web with 32MB of RAM (hey, so did I) it was with "HTML 1.0" and small images.. remember back when web pages had mostly text, grey backgrounds, and a few pictures here and there?
These days we have:
- JavaScript - a full fledged interpreted language
- the DOM - complete read/write live access to the current document's structure
- CSS, which involves applying complex matching of style to document fragments and formatting of those fragments,
- new layout concepts like absolute and relative positining, floats, etc
- vastly more complex layout due to interactions of HTML rules and CSS rules
- plugins
- XML
- support for JPEG, PNG, animated GIFs
- HTTP 1.1 with reusable connections, pipelining, compression, smarter but more complex caching, and more
And thats the short list. And as much as you might say "that's just fluff! That's not the core of the web" you'd sure be complaining if your web browser didn't support all that.
The web is a lot more complex than it once was. You can't harken back to the days of Mosaic without realizing all the technologies that go into a modern web browser.
Andreesen had nothing to do with the freeing of the mozilla codebase. Credit that to a man named Frank Hecker, who was I think a high level tech evangelist at Netscape. He still appears every once in a while in open source circles... Frank was always the driving force behind freeing the lizard, not Marc.
oh please. Andreesen is a tool. He was a guy in the right place at the right time and the presse jumped all over him for being an internet visionary. He was just another geek at UIUC until Jim Clark took him and his friends and said "Lets make a product out of your Mosaic"
Now granted, this whole www-revolution might not have happened if the press didn't have SOME geek posterboy to drool over, but I have yet to see any evidence that Andreesen is any more visionary than any other C programmer.
If you threw me up in front of the press, I might make a bunch of forecasts about the future that sounded exciting too. Like him, I'd probably also tout a bunch of technology or trends that I knew nothing about. Lets not forget his fleeting interest in nanotechnology, or how LoudCloud was going to be the most successful web services company EVER.. not to mention his praising of Microsoft some years back.
Ok, so I got my playstation2 a few years ago, and I love perusing screenshots of the latest games online, thinking to myself "Wow, if only I had time to immerse myself in THAT!"
So its really hard for me to justify dropping $50 on a game that I know I'll only get to play for 5-10 hours in a month. And I know that about 50% of the time, I get bored or stuck in a game before finishing it.
My solution is to put the games in my amazon "save for later" queue and check back periodically as the games get cheaper and cheaper, and become available via the "used" channels. When I can get a game for $20 or less, I buy it. The disadvantage of this is that I usually have to wait a good 4-5 months before games are this cheap, and by then I've seen 5 other games that I'm drooling over at that moment.
A model like this would help serve my "that looks cool right now!" urge, but I wonder about the monthly-installment type of thing. When I do get bored/stuck, it is after about a month of gameplay. I might be willing to pony up $5 or $10 during that first month to buy the next installment or two early, while the game still has my attention... especially if I started the game for free. My net cost could be lower and I'd probably get the same enjoyment out of it..
Thanks for all the great responses folks! Sounds like an 83 or 83+ is what I want - I wasn't sure if there was a lot of difference in the way the "UI" (i.e. buttons) worked between the different models.
And yes, I'm going to be a high school teacher, this student teaching is the last step in the process...
I'm kind of half kidding, half serious with my first answer: in this day and age, kids want and instantaneous result. They don't want to spend 30 minutes graphing a complex function (or even x^2) at all, especially if there is a faster alternative. Besides, they've done that already in Algebra I.
But more seriously, its easy for those of us who have long been out of Algebra II to think that most kids have the patience and interest to continue to graph functions by hand when they've been doing it for at least a year or two... sure, us math geeks might like that but most kids will get the big picture stuff but get easily hung up on details. As the functions get more complex, the details just get hairier, and the actual concepts being learned are lost.
Basically, imagine you've never seen a sine wave before. Would you rather try to graph sin(1), sin(2), sin(3), etc by hand and get a bunch of random points, or would you like someone to say "here's how to graph sin(x) now lets figure out what makes it look that way, where the peaks and valleys are, etc"?
So I'm starting as a student teacher in about 2 weeks for a high school Algebra II course.. the course lives and dies by its box of TI-83's.. I'd like to buy a personal TI-xx so I can hack around with it at home..
I suppose I could just go buy a TI-83 Plus, but I wanted to see if anyone had any particular recommendations....
When I was in school all we had were these crappy Casio gfx-7000 calulators - I've never owned a TI, so frankly I can't figure out the difference between the 83, 86, 89, etc...
Being a student (and future teacher) I don't have a lot of money.. so what matters most to me is price, but I'm willing to spend an extra $10 or $20 if there is some key, awesome feature I would get by buying another model.. but at the same time, I want the basic operation to be as close to a TI-83 as possible.
Thoughts?
Rumor has it a certain Mr. Flinstone will pay $1 million dollars to the first person to port mozilla to "that wooden calculator with the bird inside."
oh, yes, the reason mozilla hasn't been ported is because there are other browsers.
It couldn't possibly be because the amiga is a dead platform and the 42 users out there haven't figured out how to write software for a platform made in the last 10 years.
Look, I hate flamewars as much as the next guy, but come ON! This is the amiga for cripes sake.
I actually live in California (maybe that explains my crazy leftist attitude about the 'downtrodden' :)) and I don't pay any extra tax on stuff that I order out of state.
As for people who can't afford $20 a month - there are a lot out there. Don't forget too that you need a computer ($200-1000, depending on how much you know about computers - the less you know, the more you'll probably end up paying) - that initial investment is steep when you're making some $30,000 a year.
Don't assume that your social circle is representitive of the US.
There's a difference between "was online last year" and "has enough internet access to shop online" - I might have been able to get online once a week last year to check my e-mail, but that doesn't mean I've got dialup at home or a job that gives me free internet access.
the quoted statistics only prove my point - that almost half the US population (though, since when was 104 million adults considered 'more than half' of the population of a 300M person country?) don't have access to the tax-shelter that is online shopping. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what seperates those with internet access and those without. I'll give you a clue: its not what color car they drive.
And so no, I'm not a 'lonely crusader for the downtrodden' A crusader I may be, but I'm not lonely, nor is half the population of the US 'downtrodden' - take a peek outside your socioeconomic class, you might learn something!
They should have been doing this all along.. internet access has always been something that has been accessible only to the people who can afford the luxury of a dialup ISP or even broadband. Those are the people that should be taxed, not the people whose income dictates that they must shop locally. If anything the lack of tax has been a form of discount to consumers who make a certain minimum income.
its sort of like, "If you can afford $20+ a month, you get a discount on purchases as long as you use the internet to make them!"
Granted more and more people are getting online and it is becoming more and more affordable to the general public, but still not everyone has internet access, and not everyone can afford to get online to do their shopping!
Heh. Well learn something new every day. between this and a few of the other posts I've finally come to understand what this means!
:)
Its amazing that it takes some slashdot posts to actually get this information. All the "traditional" financial information sources (CBS Marketwatch, CNN/Money, etc) couldn't explain it in a way that made sense to me
... also responsible for headlines such as "Prez Looks Bushed"
this guys article has no data to back up his flaming claims. Yes, AOL is a behemoth who's stock has tanked, but the fact is that earnings growth bested the economy's growth, and the $54b "loss" is a direct result of the stock tanking, not the other way around. the $54b "charge" was not paid to anyone, it was lost value in market cap.
This is like me (who knows nothing about sports) spelling doom for the Boston Red Sox because three of their players are injured. Not only would that claim be absurd, but I don't even know what I'm talking about when I make claims about sports teams.
And yes, I'm an AOL Time Warner employee at Netscape (since before the AOL/Netscape merger!) and I'm not happy about the situation, but I get so sick and tired of 'analysis' of the company made by idiots who know nothing about the subject they're analyzing, and are just looking for something else to rant about.
Mozilla successfully switched to autoconf a few years ago, and it has made porting much easier. we have a very extensive autoconf system...check out all the ports we do now, thanks in part to autoconf Mozilla Ports
This is simply not true...nobody is translating mozilla to C and running it, and there is no faction within the mozilla community which is pushing to use C. Long ago there were a number of C-only advocates working at Netscape (jwz as an example) but they are no longer there.
The C++ portability guidelines are just that: _portability_ _guidelines_. The primary goal is to make it work on as many compilers as possible, and they are guidelines not rules. There are some platforms which, to this day, do not support anything beyond the simplest C++ templates.
Mozilla makes extensive use of templates with their nsCOMPtr class, but this particular class has been well tested on many platforms, and has many conditional #ifdef's which handle the broken compilers. But this is one major class for which the usefulness outweighed the maintenance costs. If the Mozilla team had to maintain 100 different constantly-changing template classes on 20 different compilers each with their own quirks, it would be a nightmare.
Since Sony will be using a Netscape-branded version of mozilla, they will have full CSS1/2, DOM1/2, etc... they're not using the braindead 4.x! I also would highly doubt they would use Netscape 6 since mozilla has progressed so far since then..
Sony has been porting mozilla to the PS2 with the help of Netscape, thus a Netscape branded Mozilla.. not 4.x
XPCOM is completely independant from Windows' COM. the reason for the file size difference is the compilers. Part of this is that Microsoft simply makes a better compiler on Windows than gcc is on Linux. The other part is that gcc and ld do not properly truly unused strip symbols from binaries when a link is done.
.so will be 30-60% larger than the windows .dll.
try it - take a large set of XP code, and build a dll on each platform. the linux