I try to make valid XHTML 1.0 strict pages. Of course if you turn your back for a second it is easy to let some none standard stuff slip in. But on the whole my sites should (mostly) validate as xhtml 1.0 strict.
The nice thing about XHTML is that it is really straightforward to maintain. It's HTML the way it is supposed to be. If you don't use CSS to style it, it probably renders something usefull in any browser in use today. The problem is that you need to use CSS to provide layout and that no browser fully supports the CSS standards correctly. Mozilla does a nice job but does have many known bugs if you try to do some more exotic stuff. Internet explorer comes along nicely, as long as you avoid specific constructions. Opera and KHTML probably don't do a bad job either but I don't test for those.
Overall I am positive about XHTML. I deliberately do not support netscape 4 (the handfull of users of that product have plenty of alternatives) and that does make life easier. If only it didn't try to interpret the CSS!
The only downside of XHTML is that you have to use CSS, which IMHO is a very flawed language for what it's supposed to do. It is way too complex and that is also the reason why there is currently no fully compliant implementation available. In addition it is awfully limited in what it can do. It can be very frustrating to get very basic designs implemented in CSS. E.g. there is no obvious, clean way to get a status bar below three variable height columns. There's several dirty ways of doing it, though.
Annoyingly, Internet Explorer always manages not to support features you absolutely need to get an elegant design working in it (this is not a problem with CSS of course). Really the only reason people resort to javascript for making menus is internet explorer's lack of support for CSS. You can do collapsible, nested menus with just a handfull of straightforward lines of CSS.
Mozilla does a lot better and you are unlikely to run into bugs unless you really know your way around CSS. Typically the stuff that doesn't work requires a CSS expert to explain to mere mortals what it was supposed to do in the first place.
I recently browsed through the CSS3 specs and I really hope to see some good implementations of it soon. It solves a lot of problems. Unfortunately I am very pessimistic about seeing any compliant implementations of it in wide use in the near future.
Lately I have been giving some thought to doing mozilla only designs. It would make life much more pleasant. Unfortunately over 80% of my visitors are stuck with internet explorer.
I think another reason is that serial is just as scalable and a lot simpler to implement. Just because you are not sending each bit of a byte through a different wire does not imply that each byte/packet/frame has to travel through the same wire. The larger the datachuncks the less work it is to put them in the right order.
Using more than one serial channel could very well be possible. However, with the slot format of PCI/X this it is probably not very practical to use more than one slot.
Does anyone know why there actually still is a need for slots? I imagine there would be a lot of advantages with using cables instead of slots and cards.
No, it's not running out of the sandbox. The bug is in the javascript which allows the page developer to secretly access a website behind your back. This website happens to also load an applet. Java then applies the usual sandbox restrictions to that website (i.e. you can't go anywhere else, no local file access, etc.).
The applet can access the same information on your PC as normally (i.e. almost nothing). And the applet can communicate with server applications on on the website. The security risk is the same as with any other applet on any other site. The only difference is that the browser makes the choice of loading it instead of you (just like with popups). You think you're visiting server x and you are redirected to server y.
The fix for this bug is to fix the javascript implementation. Not a single line of the java implementation needs to be changed for this. Apparently this has been done in Mozilla already.
Probably he's installing the really old version that's provided on the texturizer extensions site. Most people probably never figure out that the experimental build is much nicer. I'm using it right now and it supports nearly all of the features the original google toolbar has.
Just go to googlebar.mozdev.org, ignore the 0.4.x rc3 build that is recommended and go for the 'experimental' build.
Especially for windows 9x, winnt 3.x & 4 and win2k users who will forever be stuck with ie 5.5.
IE 5.5 was actually not that bad in 2000 (?). I recall using it before pop ups were all over the place. Pretty stable too (compared to its predecessors). However, I'd hate to be stuck with a three year old browser now.
Try doing transparency with png's in IE. They sort of support png but transparency was clearly too much for the IE programmers. That's why everybody still uses transparent gifs (which are much less attractive due to the lack of alpha channel support) and ugly css hacks (which due to faulty implementations is not easy either). Png's work beautifully in mozilla though.
If only MS could be bothered to fully implement web standards, it would be much easier to create nice looking sites.
There's this perception that the transition to firebird & thunderbird will lead to a loss of features. Based on my experience with mozilla firebird over the past few months and recent thunderbird builds, I'd say the opposite is true. Reasons why you'd want to stick to the 1.4 suite are rapidly vaporizing. Allready I find firebird to be much nicer than the regular mozilla browser. I tried one of the thunderbird builds last week and was nearly tempted to make it my primary email client (stability however is important to me and this is pre-alpha software). Mozilla mail never got me this far and I'm still an outlook user.
If people bothered to read the paper, they'd know that the OSI claims that BSD and SCO do share the same legacy of source code (i.e. they both evolved from Bell Unix). In fact SCO chose to settle a legal argument with the BSD people about code infringement because it became very clear that it was actually sco infringing on BSD (alledgedly they copied thousands of bsd licensed source files and stripped them from copyright and license) rather than the other way around.
Firebird is derived from the same code base as mozilla so obviously it has a lot in common with its parent. However, it's the little things that matter and a lot of little things are different in firebird. I never liked the mozilla gui it feels bloated, buttons are in the wrong place, labeled improperly, etc (and the default theme is extremely ugly). Firebird has a much better UI and ships with a really elegant theme. A small illustration of this 'better' design is the behavior of the middle button. Unlike mozilla, middle clicking (to open a link in a new tab) also works on bookmarks, bookmark sidebar, history sidebar and toolbar links. In mozilla it only works on links in a page. This is just one example of better UI design.
This, and the fact that firebird is more tweakable than mozilla, is the reason I use firebird. I wasn't expecting much of it the first time I installed it (0.4 nightly). It looked really simplistic but I soon discovered that under the hood it was still mozilla. This morning I installed 0.6. After installation I rearranged the toolbar (cool drag & drop UI), installed some of my favorite extensions (googlebar, tab extensions, popup alt), tweaked some undocumented stuff (e.g. nglayout.initialpaint.delay=0) and edited only one or two settings in the preferences UI (most of the defaults make sense). The resulting browser has most of the features I want in a browser, looks nice and elegant and performs nicely. Comparing it to mozilla browser is really unfair because the firebird developers kept all the good stuff and threw away most of the bad stuff in mozilla.
The speed difference is real BTW, even on fast machines. With firebird I just close the browser if I'm done surfing and open it when I need it again later on. With mozilla that takes me too much time. Especially if all relevant files are in the cache, firebird launches almost instantly (like IE). I have a lot of memory and hence a lot of cache so most of the time, firebird launches really fast (1 to 2 seconds typically).
The votes were never recounted. Bush campaigned and successfully stopped a recount. Later all evidence was destroyed so we will never know for sure whether he won the election. I'd say the small majority Bush claimed in the end falls well within the huge margin of error that results from using outdated and unreliable voting technology as is common in the US. The outcome may be legal but it was most definately unscientific.
The democratic thing to do would have been to do a re-election. State-wide or maybe even country wide. However, does it really matter if one guy with a few thousand more supporters than another guy gets to be president? Probably if Bush had farted in public once during the campaign it would have had a stronger effect than if all voting machines would have been perfect. In the end Gore lost his once comfortable (projected) majority and Bush won enough to be able to represent the US people. That's good enough for me. It's better to have a winner than a loser for a president.
Personally, I would have rather seen a democrat win the election but I don't have the right to vote in the US.
If you can make a business case for rewriting an existing piece of software, any sane project manager should go for it. The whole problem is that most programming still happens based on hunches & gut feelings. If there's too much money like before the.com crisis, you can afford to aimlessly optimize pieces of code like that and get away with it. However, in the current economic situation, people are not handing out money anymore. You have to convince people to do so.
Delivering a piece of code on time with the desired level of quality still boils down to black magic in many organizations. A large percentage of software projects either fails or delivers something different than was intended. People have noticed this and telling them that you'll lock yourself up, hack away for a couple of weeks and maybe something good will come out does not do the trick anymore. They simply do not trust you to deliver what you claim you can deliver anymore.
Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't rewrite code. You should however, make more of an effort to provide evidence to the relevant people that a) there is a problem with the code that should be fixed (e.g. bugfixes take an unusual amount of resources on that part of the code) b) you have a plan for resolving this problem (e.g. spending two weeks on refactoring) and c) this plan is cost-effective (this is the hard part).
I've seen a project where it was calculated that fixing the outstanding 100 or so bugs for a component (serious bugs) would cost a certain amount of money. This process was likely to introduce more bugs of the same serious nature (given experience with maintaining this component). An alternative was to redesign and reimplement the offending component, a plan was made to do so and it was approved because executing the plan was shown to be more cost effective than continuing to maintain the old component. The plan was executed and the new component has so far proven to be more reliable and maintainable.
So the first guy who manages to intercept the data stream that goes to the cd burner (should be near trivial) effectively is in violation of the DMCA:-).
AAC just makes it harder to rip the audio, not impossible. It will take a while for such tools to appear. Also I suspect demand won't be very high since most people will prefer to have their mp3 directly ripped from a cd (AAC is already lossy, decoding and then reencoding only loses more quality).
However, it seems that Apple, unlike the RIAA, gets the point. People are willing to pay for the convenience of being able to find what they want fast and easy, not to finance obsolete distribution methods. The 99 cent price is by all means very reasonable (though still a bit high) and there are many people who'll be happy to pay for the convenience of not having to hunt down each and every track they want to listen to. On the other hand this puts the market value of my current mp3 collection at roughly 3500$. Much less than the RIAA would want us to believe but still a substantial amount of money.
Idea for the RIAA: make lots of noise about sueing people, offer mp3 owners to legalize their mp3 collections for a reasonable price -> profit. If they do it right they could squeeze some revenue out of this without actually having to do anything beyond handing out electronic licenses.
You cannot get guarantees but a bufferoverflow in a JVM is a lot less likely to go unnoticed than a buffer overflow in your own software. It's a simple matter of reducing the amount of points where stuff can go wrong. If the JVM has a bug, one of the millions of developers is likely to run into it at some point.
95% I read about security issues in linux/bsd/unix related software (e.g. bind seems to be affected often), seems to indicate that buffer overflows are the cause. Eliminate the cause for these buffer overflows (either by updating the C language or the C programmers) and you eliminate 95% (ok, guesstimate) of the security issues.
Updating the C programmers has been tried for decades now and we still have buffer overflows -> so that has never worked and probably never will work. This leads to the extremely obvious conclusion that C is not a good choice for building reliable software. If you require reliability, don't use C or be prepared to invest heavily in testing, programmer training, etc.
Open Source is just a form of free speech. It is true of free speech in general that it also allows forms of speech that groups of people don't like. That's the reason that totalitarian regimes generally do not allow free speech.
Now as far as terrorists are concerned, I don't think they care about going through the proper activation procedure when using MS products. So when MS delivers a software product it is equally available to terrorists than when Linus Torvalds releases a piece of software. The very nature of terrorism is that terrorists generally don't care about any law including copyright laws, the dmca, patent law, etc. Anything just protected by these laws is available to terrorists.
If Osama Bin Laden wants access to windows source code in his cave he'll probably have little trouble getting it through irc (it must have leaked by now with all this shared source bullshit). True, downloading the linux source code is a lot more convenient but the result is the same as far as Osama is concerned. Getting caught for pirating software is the least of his concerns.
What I find worrying is that a lot of things that concern the US government are placed in the context of terrorism lately. The concept of freedom of speech, one of the things many US citizens appear to be proud of, seems to have become a myth rather than reality. Independent journalists still exist in the US, they just don't get a job anymore. CNN routinely kicks out journalists if they get too critical.
Apply Moore's law to these economically feasible storage terms and it will be obvious that it will become economically feasible to store this information longer than the average age of people (75) in about 12 years (assuming 6 months & that moore's law applies to storage capacity as well). Maybe it will be a few months more but eventually it will become economically feasible to collect and keep this kind of data.
In addition to the obvious convenience for e.g. Kazaa users, one could use this as a cheap alternative to creating dvd's from your homemovies. Just convert your homemovies to divx, burn them on a cheap cdr (as opposed to still very expensive dvdrs) and you have nice cheap good quality video that you can watch on your vcr.
Second idea: cd companies could burn a divx video on along with the sound on a multisession cd. Should play just fine in any cd player and owners of PCs/Macs/Whatever or this cool device get a little extra.
There's plenty of legal uses for this device. I want one even though I don't own a video camera:-).
As I said mozilla is a forward looking project. If you're stuck on old hardware that in principle is your problem and not the Mozilla project's problem. Considering it is 2003, its requirements are quite reasonable. Even on my fathers old laptop with a 28k8 modem I would probably manage to download mozilla in three hours or so, which if he had 128MB or more would actually already have happened. Since he has only 16mb, he's stuck with opera 5.x (my father's pc is now 7 years old).
As far as DSL is concerned you are indeed not lucky if you live in a remote area. Luckily local phone calls are free in the US so you can just turn the machine on and go for a really long coffee break.
BTW. you're either paying way too much for your memory or the price has nearly doubled in three weeks. I bought my extra 512 MB of DDR333 for 75 euro which would be about 80$ I guess.
I have 1 GB of low cost memory in my machine and 12 MB downloads in no time at all using my cheap dsl connection. If it was 24 MB I wouldn't even notice the difference. Mozilla is a browser project looking forward, not backwards. Removing/leaving out features to keep a handful of poorly equiped users happy is not really an option.
So how come that these people who worried about activex security are downloading and installing unsigned mozilla extensions? It's not like there is any security for mozilla extensions. The only reason this kind of issue is not yet surfacing on mozilla is because it doesn't have enough users yet.
A reason why 1.0 got kicked off my PC within days after the install was the total lack of support for crossreferences. I was nearly converted to Open Office until I tried to insert a reference to some numbered section in my document. There was just no way to do it. I checked the documentation, helpfiles, web forums, newsgroups and eventually I discovered that this feature was simply not implemented.
In Latex, word, wordperfect, framemaker etc. you can insert a reference to e.g. section numbers, figure numbers, literature references, etc. Not in open office. There is something called crossreference but it is really some sort of bookmark feature (i.e. you can set a reference and then refer to it). That of course is totally inadequate. I recently browsed issuezilla to see if there was any activity around this IMHO showstopping issue (as far as I'm concerned). But I couldn't find much at all. Apparently its a known issue, some persons are assigned to bugs related to this issue (e.g. 3802 & 4439) but not much else seems to have happened since these bugs were filed (pre 1.0 beta). I was hoping that this would be addressed in 1.1 but judging from issuezilla they are not taking this very seriously.
I'm currently using framemaker and ms word. The latter is unstable & generally sucks for large documents and Framemaker isn't getting the maintenance it needs to remain competitive (last two versions basically did not add anything useful). I want to replace them with a stable alternative like open office. However, crossreferences are important to me. I use them all the time and manual updates are not an option for me. I can live with some UI quirkyness (plenty of that in open office), lack of clippy, poor usability, poor performance, etc. but the basic functionality needs to be there.
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I try to make valid XHTML 1.0 strict pages. Of course if you turn your back for a second it is easy to let some none standard stuff slip in. But on the whole my sites should (mostly) validate as xhtml 1.0 strict.
The nice thing about XHTML is that it is really straightforward to maintain. It's HTML the way it is supposed to be. If you don't use CSS to style it, it probably renders something usefull in any browser in use today. The problem is that you need to use CSS to provide layout and that no browser fully supports the CSS standards correctly. Mozilla does a nice job but does have many known bugs if you try to do some more exotic stuff. Internet explorer comes along nicely, as long as you avoid specific constructions. Opera and KHTML probably don't do a bad job either but I don't test for those.
Overall I am positive about XHTML. I deliberately do not support netscape 4 (the handfull of users of that product have plenty of alternatives) and that does make life easier. If only it didn't try to interpret the CSS!
The only downside of XHTML is that you have to use CSS, which IMHO is a very flawed language for what it's supposed to do. It is way too complex and that is also the reason why there is currently no fully compliant implementation available. In addition it is awfully limited in what it can do. It can be very frustrating to get very basic designs implemented in CSS. E.g. there is no obvious, clean way to get a status bar below three variable height columns. There's several dirty ways of doing it, though.
Annoyingly, Internet Explorer always manages not to support features you absolutely need to get an elegant design working in it (this is not a problem with CSS of course). Really the only reason people resort to javascript for making menus is internet explorer's lack of support for CSS. You can do collapsible, nested menus with just a handfull of straightforward lines of CSS.
Mozilla does a lot better and you are unlikely to run into bugs unless you really know your way around CSS. Typically the stuff that doesn't work requires a CSS expert to explain to mere mortals what it was supposed to do in the first place.
I recently browsed through the CSS3 specs and I really hope to see some good implementations of it soon. It solves a lot of problems. Unfortunately I am very pessimistic about seeing any compliant implementations of it in wide use in the near future.
Lately I have been giving some thought to doing mozilla only designs. It would make life much more pleasant. Unfortunately over 80% of my visitors are stuck with internet explorer.
I think another reason is that serial is just as scalable and a lot simpler to implement. Just because you are not sending each bit of a byte through a different wire does not imply that each byte/packet/frame has to travel through the same wire. The larger the datachuncks the less work it is to put them in the right order.
Using more than one serial channel could very well be possible. However, with the slot format of PCI/X this it is probably not very practical to use more than one slot.
Does anyone know why there actually still is a need for slots? I imagine there would be a lot of advantages with using cables instead of slots and cards.
The links are decorated with a dashed line. It is hard to see (and ugly), but there is a decoration.
No, it's not running out of the sandbox. The bug is in the javascript which allows the page developer to secretly access a website behind your back. This website happens to also load an applet. Java then applies the usual sandbox restrictions to that website (i.e. you can't go anywhere else, no local file access, etc.).
The applet can access the same information on your PC as normally (i.e. almost nothing). And the applet can communicate with server applications on on the website. The security risk is the same as with any other applet on any other site. The only difference is that the browser makes the choice of loading it instead of you (just like with popups). You think you're visiting server x and you are redirected to server y.
The fix for this bug is to fix the javascript implementation. Not a single line of the java implementation needs to be changed for this. Apparently this has been done in Mozilla already.
It has been a recommended W3C standard since 1996. MS has an extremely poor record of providing correct implementations of W3C standards, though.
Probably he's installing the really old version that's provided on the texturizer extensions site. Most people probably never figure out that the experimental build is much nicer. I'm using it right now and it supports nearly all of the features the original google toolbar has.
Just go to googlebar.mozdev.org, ignore the 0.4.x rc3 build that is recommended and go for the 'experimental' build.
Especially for windows 9x, winnt 3.x & 4 and win2k users who will forever be stuck with ie 5.5.
IE 5.5 was actually not that bad in 2000 (?). I recall using it before pop ups were all over the place. Pretty stable too (compared to its predecessors). However, I'd hate to be stuck with a three year old browser now.
Try doing transparency with png's in IE. They sort of support png but transparency was clearly too much for the IE programmers. That's why everybody still uses transparent gifs (which are much less attractive due to the lack of alpha channel support) and ugly css hacks (which due to faulty implementations is not easy either). Png's work beautifully in mozilla though.
If only MS could be bothered to fully implement web standards, it would be much easier to create nice looking sites.
There's this perception that the transition to firebird & thunderbird will lead to a loss of features. Based on my experience with mozilla firebird over the past few months and recent thunderbird builds, I'd say the opposite is true. Reasons why you'd want to stick to the 1.4 suite are rapidly vaporizing. Allready I find firebird to be much nicer than the regular mozilla browser. I tried one of the thunderbird builds last week and was nearly tempted to make it my primary email client (stability however is important to me and this is pre-alpha software). Mozilla mail never got me this far and I'm still an outlook user.
http://www.mondrian-script.org/mondrian/index.html , this answers your question I think.
Probably there is a fortran compiler for .Net (as there is for cobol and many other languages) but F# is not it.
If people bothered to read the paper, they'd know that the OSI claims that BSD and SCO do share the same legacy of source code (i.e. they both evolved from Bell Unix). In fact SCO chose to settle a legal argument with the BSD people about code infringement because it became very clear that it was actually sco infringing on BSD (alledgedly they copied thousands of bsd licensed source files and stripped them from copyright and license) rather than the other way around.
Firebird is derived from the same code base as mozilla so obviously it has a lot in common with its parent. However, it's the little things that matter and a lot of little things are different in firebird. I never liked the mozilla gui it feels bloated, buttons are in the wrong place, labeled improperly, etc (and the default theme is extremely ugly). Firebird has a much better UI and ships with a really elegant theme. A small illustration of this 'better' design is the behavior of the middle button. Unlike mozilla, middle clicking (to open a link in a new tab) also works on bookmarks, bookmark sidebar, history sidebar and toolbar links. In mozilla it only works on links in a page. This is just one example of better UI design.
This, and the fact that firebird is more tweakable than mozilla, is the reason I use firebird. I wasn't expecting much of it the first time I installed it (0.4 nightly). It looked really simplistic but I soon discovered that under the hood it was still mozilla. This morning I installed 0.6. After installation I rearranged the toolbar (cool drag & drop UI), installed some of my favorite extensions (googlebar, tab extensions, popup alt), tweaked some undocumented stuff (e.g. nglayout.initialpaint.delay=0) and edited only one or two settings in the preferences UI (most of the defaults make sense). The resulting browser has most of the features I want in a browser, looks nice and elegant and performs nicely. Comparing it to mozilla browser is really unfair because the firebird developers kept all the good stuff and threw away most of the bad stuff in mozilla.
The speed difference is real BTW, even on fast machines. With firebird I just close the browser if I'm done surfing and open it when I need it again later on. With mozilla that takes me too much time. Especially if all relevant files are in the cache, firebird launches almost instantly (like IE). I have a lot of memory and hence a lot of cache so most of the time, firebird launches really fast (1 to 2 seconds typically).
The votes were never recounted. Bush campaigned and successfully stopped a recount. Later all evidence was destroyed so we will never know for sure whether he won the election. I'd say the small majority Bush claimed in the end falls well within the huge margin of error that results from using outdated and unreliable voting technology as is common in the US. The outcome may be legal but it was most definately unscientific.
The democratic thing to do would have been to do a re-election. State-wide or maybe even country wide. However, does it really matter if one guy with a few thousand more supporters than another guy gets to be president? Probably if Bush had farted in public once during the campaign it would have had a stronger effect than if all voting machines would have been perfect. In the end Gore lost his once comfortable (projected) majority and Bush won enough to be able to represent the US people. That's good enough for me. It's better to have a winner than a loser for a president.
Personally, I would have rather seen a democrat win the election but I don't have the right to vote in the US.
If you can make a business case for rewriting an existing piece of software, any sane project manager should go for it. The whole problem is that most programming still happens based on hunches & gut feelings. If there's too much money like before the .com crisis, you can afford to aimlessly optimize pieces of code like that and get away with it. However, in the current economic situation, people are not handing out money anymore. You have to convince people to do so.
Delivering a piece of code on time with the desired level of quality still boils down to black magic in many organizations. A large percentage of software projects either fails or delivers something different than was intended.
People have noticed this and telling them that you'll lock yourself up, hack away for a couple of weeks and maybe something good will come out does not do the trick anymore. They simply do not trust you to deliver what you claim you can deliver anymore.
Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't rewrite code. You should however, make more of an effort to provide evidence to the relevant people that a) there is a problem with the code that should be fixed (e.g. bugfixes take an unusual amount of resources on that part of the code) b) you have a plan for resolving this problem (e.g. spending two weeks on refactoring) and c) this plan is cost-effective (this is the hard part).
I've seen a project where it was calculated that fixing the outstanding 100 or so bugs for a component (serious bugs) would cost a certain amount of money. This process was likely to introduce more bugs of the same serious nature (given experience with maintaining this component). An alternative was to redesign and reimplement the offending component, a plan was made to do so and it was approved because executing the plan was shown to be more cost effective than continuing to maintain the old component. The plan was executed and the new component has so far proven to be more reliable and maintainable.
So the first guy who manages to intercept the data stream that goes to the cd burner (should be near trivial) effectively is in violation of the DMCA :-).
AAC just makes it harder to rip the audio, not impossible. It will take a while for such tools to appear. Also I suspect demand won't be very high since most people will prefer to have their mp3 directly ripped from a cd (AAC is already lossy, decoding and then reencoding only loses more quality).
However, it seems that Apple, unlike the RIAA, gets the point. People are willing to pay for the convenience of being able to find what they want fast and easy, not to finance obsolete distribution methods. The 99 cent price is by all means very reasonable (though still a bit high) and there are many people who'll be happy to pay for the convenience of not having to hunt down each and every track they want to listen to. On the other hand this puts the market value of my current mp3 collection at roughly 3500$. Much less than the RIAA would want us to believe but still a substantial amount of money.
Idea for the RIAA: make lots of noise about sueing people, offer mp3 owners to legalize their mp3 collections for a reasonable price -> profit. If they do it right they could squeeze some revenue out of this without actually having to do anything beyond handing out electronic licenses.
No the us have long ago 'liberated' alaska.
You cannot get guarantees but a bufferoverflow in a JVM is a lot less likely to go unnoticed than a buffer overflow in your own software. It's a simple matter of reducing the amount of points where stuff can go wrong. If the JVM has a bug, one of the millions of developers is likely to run into it at some point.
95% I read about security issues in linux/bsd/unix related software (e.g. bind seems to be affected often), seems to indicate that buffer overflows are the cause. Eliminate the cause for these buffer overflows (either by updating the C language or the C programmers) and you eliminate 95% (ok, guesstimate) of the security issues.
Updating the C programmers has been tried for decades now and we still have buffer overflows -> so that has never worked and probably never will work. This leads to the extremely obvious conclusion that C is not a good choice for building reliable software. If you require reliability, don't use C or be prepared to invest heavily in testing, programmer training, etc.
Open Source is just a form of free speech. It is true of free speech in general that it also allows forms of speech that groups of people don't like. That's the reason that totalitarian regimes generally do not allow free speech.
Now as far as terrorists are concerned, I don't think they care about going through the proper activation procedure when using MS products. So when MS delivers a software product it is equally available to terrorists than when Linus Torvalds releases a piece of software. The very nature of terrorism is that terrorists generally don't care about any law including copyright laws, the dmca, patent law, etc. Anything just protected by these laws is available to terrorists.
If Osama Bin Laden wants access to windows source code in his cave he'll probably have little trouble getting it through irc (it must have leaked by now with all this shared source bullshit). True, downloading the linux source code is a lot more convenient but the result is the same as far as Osama is concerned. Getting caught for pirating software is the least of his concerns.
What I find worrying is that a lot of things that concern the US government are placed in the context of terrorism lately. The concept of freedom of speech, one of the things many US citizens appear to be proud of, seems to have become a myth rather than reality. Independent journalists still exist in the US, they just don't get a job anymore. CNN routinely kicks out journalists if they get too critical.
Apply Moore's law to these economically feasible storage terms and it will be obvious that it will become economically feasible to store this information longer than the average age of people (75) in about 12 years (assuming 6 months & that moore's law applies to storage capacity as well). Maybe it will be a few months more but eventually it will become economically feasible to collect and keep this kind of data.
In addition to the obvious convenience for e.g. Kazaa users, one could use this as a cheap alternative to creating dvd's from your homemovies. Just convert your homemovies to divx, burn them on a cheap cdr (as opposed to still very expensive dvdrs) and you have nice cheap good quality video that you can watch on your vcr.
:-).
Second idea: cd companies could burn a divx video on along with the sound on a multisession cd. Should play just fine in any cd player and owners of PCs/Macs/Whatever or this cool device get a little extra.
There's plenty of legal uses for this device. I want one even though I don't own a video camera
As I said mozilla is a forward looking project. If you're stuck on old hardware that in principle is your problem and not the Mozilla project's problem. Considering it is 2003, its requirements are quite reasonable. Even on my fathers old laptop with a 28k8 modem I would probably manage to download mozilla in three hours or so, which if he had 128MB or more would actually already have happened. Since he has only 16mb, he's stuck with opera 5.x (my father's pc is now 7 years old).
As far as DSL is concerned you are indeed not lucky if you live in a remote area. Luckily local phone calls are free in the US so you can just turn the machine on and go for a really long coffee break.
BTW. you're either paying way too much for your memory or the price has nearly doubled in three weeks. I bought my extra 512 MB of DDR333 for 75 euro which would be about 80$ I guess.
I have 1 GB of low cost memory in my machine and 12 MB downloads in no time at all using my cheap dsl connection. If it was 24 MB I wouldn't even notice the difference. Mozilla is a browser project looking forward, not backwards. Removing/leaving out features to keep a handful of poorly equiped users happy is not really an option.
So how come that these people who worried about activex security are downloading and installing unsigned mozilla extensions? It's not like there is any security for mozilla extensions. The only reason this kind of issue is not yet surfacing on mozilla is because it doesn't have enough users yet.
A reason why 1.0 got kicked off my PC within days after the install was the total lack of support for crossreferences. I was nearly converted to Open Office until I tried to insert a reference to some numbered section in my document. There was just no way to do it. I checked the documentation, helpfiles, web forums, newsgroups and eventually I discovered that this feature was simply not implemented.
In Latex, word, wordperfect, framemaker etc. you can insert a reference to e.g. section numbers, figure numbers, literature references, etc. Not in open office. There is something called crossreference but it is really some sort of bookmark feature (i.e. you can set a reference and then refer to it). That of course is totally inadequate. I recently browsed issuezilla to see if there was any activity around this IMHO showstopping issue (as far as I'm concerned). But I couldn't find much at all. Apparently its a known issue, some persons are assigned to bugs related to this issue (e.g. 3802 & 4439) but not much else seems to have happened since these bugs were filed (pre 1.0 beta). I was hoping that this would be addressed in 1.1 but judging from issuezilla they are not taking this very seriously.
I'm currently using framemaker and ms word. The latter is unstable & generally sucks for large documents and Framemaker isn't getting the maintenance it needs to remain competitive (last two versions basically did not add anything useful). I want to replace them with a stable alternative like open office. However, crossreferences are important to me. I use them all the time and manual updates are not an option for me. I can live with some UI quirkyness (plenty of that in open office), lack of clippy, poor usability, poor performance, etc. but the basic functionality needs to be there.