Think about it, you're a large company like AOL. You are in the business of selling the internet and you want to commoditise the browser business so that you aren't hung out to dry later.
Using Mozilla as the basis for their browser is the best decision they could make for their long-term success.
Sure there might be some short-term pain involved, although I rarely see sites that don't work with Mozilla, and nor does my wife who browses more sites and isn't an internet guru.
I am the lead architect for a new domain name registration system currently in development.
Our client has publicly stated that when it is completed this software will be released under the GPL. That includes server software supporting geographically separate database replicas, and a full client implementation including management functionality.
It would be interesting to see it used for the.org TLD - currently it is being developed for the.nz ccTLD, but the design is intended to allow for use in any other TLD.
Man do I wish that the current arsehole using e-mail addresses in my domain would stop doing it.
There appears to be absolutely sweet fuck-all I can do about this abuse of our domain. This is equivalent to identity theft, but how can I find the bastard and sue them for every penny they have?
Could you do this with two firewalls on the machine running inside user-mode linux?
Other than that, I would say get into the network code. You might be better with an older kernel (2.2.x) since the 2.4.x have the fancy zero-copy network stuff which is probably what is your problem.
If I write an application for counting chicken egg hatching probablity and It runs under Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL I needent release a single thing as long as I dont use any GPL suff in the code I am handling myself.
In fact it is stronger than that. There is absolutely no reason why they need to release any damn thing at all, regardless of whether they use GPL stuff in the code.
The GPL requirement to make the source code available only means that these people would have to make the source code available to their customer. Hardly likely to be a problem, because the customer is likely to be the one making the decision to release in any case.
Although it doesn't have virtual folders, and as far as I can see it doesn't scale quite as well as Evolution.
I have tried both (under Debian GNU/Linux) and I have several folders of mailing lists with around 10,000-15,0000 messages in them using Evolution. I wouldn't try that with Mozilla, but it is better in some other areas, and (in your case) would win out completely in that there is a win32 version.
Really, that's complete bullshit. I know of nobody but geeks who read news nowadays.
99.9995% of customers who use Outlook, and who are fundamentally the potential customers for a product like Evolution to replace it, have no idea what news is.
And the geeks would just bitch and moan about how it doesn't do feature X the way Pan does, or rn, or whatever other toy they have been using to read news for the last fifteen years.
Face it: usenet is slowing foundering in the tar pits and is completely irrelevant to a company like Ximian as a way to make money from real customers with serious amounts of green stuff in their back pockets.
I do this for one of my sites
on
Cloaking Detection?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I make fairly extensive changes to one of my sites for search engines.
Things I do are:
Make the content more easily indexible.
Reduce the numbers of links to the same content.
Present the variable content first
I have had a number of problems with badly behaved search engines basically DoSing the site as well.
Many search engines are easily identifiable by looking at the HTTP_REFERER, but for some of the stealthier ones you have to identify them by source IP, and of course the technique is only ever going to be 95%.
I really limit the options down and make the site look much like one of those old hierarchical sites of old. After all, the search engine is going to see the whole lot of it and I'm sure it is easier for them to navigate a tree without redundant processing since most of the site navigation is about providing multiple content categorisations of what is basically the same content.
Since many of the organisations that buy these sorts of products have bias, they will select for that bias.Unless some significant market leader can manage to differentiate themselves as lacking in bias then these products will all end up reflecting conservative (american, christian) bias.
This is bad news for schools that want to avoid bias because the products that are most available will tend to be the ones that are successful in the whole market rather than in some underfunded part of it.
Re:Well, just look at the technical documentation!
on
Modem Accelerators?
·
· Score: 1
I have a 300-baud accoustically coupled modulator demodulator in the cupboard - a leftover from the days when I used to do hardware rather more often than software. I figure on pulling it out in a few years when my son is too old to trash everything, and say something like: "Y'know, Son, back in my day we had to plug the handset into the modem and a-coo-stick-lee couple it to connect to the innanet".
But I don't think that these modern fibre-optic doohickeys are called modems - at least I have never heard any of the techs I've spoken to call them that. Seems kind of right too, since "modem" kind of implies some sort of analog signal to be MOdulated and DEModulated.
And just to get back on topic, since it looks from the other comments like there might be less snake oil involved in the claims of these organisations than I first thought, I really do wonder how well they play with all that GZip encoded content smart websites are delivering nowadays.
Well, just look at the technical documentation!
on
Modem Accelerators?
·
· Score: 1
They do have technical documentation don't they?
If the service isn't 'snake oil' then it should be possible for them to explain in a reasonable way how the service work, what part of what your modem does that it accelerates.
Me, I'm betting they don't - not that I'm going to bother hitting their site to find out since I ain't someone that cares about modems any longer.
IE surely trashed Netscape 4.x in this regard, but Mozilla has passed IE's performance on this some time ago.
I have an application I have been doing for a client, and IE would just crash for them when they tried to view a table with 20,000 lines in it (they asked for all the results on one page:-) but Mozilla was perfectly happy, rendering the table in around 70 seconds on my PIII 800.
I have also noticed IE performance to be painfully slow rendering:hover CSS background, but I rarely use IE so I don't know where else it might be better/worse.
Is this throwing the baby out with the bath water? Maybe.
I spend a lot of time on the computer, as does my wife. We let my son (4) play on the computer for around 4-6 hours each week, but I would be seriously upset if they had him using a computer at pre-school.
Watching him use the computer, the most difficult problem he has is using the mouse and keyboard. The fine motor skills required almost completely eclipse the difficulty of the problems in the so-called educational software I have seen.
We don't plonk him down in front of the computer in the hope that he is being 'educated' by it - we put him down there at his request, because he enjoys playing the games at Boowa and Kwala, or the games we have bought.
Since we don't own a television, I don't think that the 4-6 hours is too much of a deal. We also supervise the use pretty closely.
No computer use would probably be not enough, in today's world. Since we give him some at home I don't think it's appropriate for him at school yet though - maybe when he's ten.
With integrated language references for HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Syntax highlighting for PHP, Perl, SQL and HTML. It works very nicely indeed. Good 'project' grouping as well.
Not a user-interface that really gets in the way - just one that lets me get on with the job.
Quanta development was languishing for a while, but Eric Laffoon has recently taken over and is kicking it back into gear and things are starting to move.
My company has a 100Mbps connection to our ISP across Citylink and it just rocks. We also connect up with a number of clients directly across it.
It cost us a lot of money to connect up, as a small (5-person) company three years ago, but it has been worth every cent.
We also run BGP and peer with many other organisations on Citylink as well. This means we don't get traffic charges for that (we do get charged for traffic volume through our ISP).
This thing has been a great boon for internet businesses in Wellington and we certainly wouldn't have been able to do the things we have done without it.
Citylink also run the New Zealand mirror for Debian, so when I 'apt-get dist-upgrade' I get phenomenal download speeds - around 1500 kb/second
From what I have read elsewhere it seems that the Slashdot effect is exactly what they want to test the streams.
This is the BBC we're talking about: It's like testing a bulldozer for performance by driving it into a wall. Hopefully the wall doesn't slow it down at all:-)
I guess that by living in a country where bilingualism is extremely rare I am prone to see a lot more problems with this idea than perhaps there would be in the US.
Nevertheless, while I have had bilingual programming staff, I have rarely seen them successfully handle top roles as designers and project managers, where language skill is much more of a barrier.
Here in New Zealand it seems that non native-english-speakers will progress much further in large programming shops than they will in small consulting organisations as well. I suppose too that this is much more the area where the Indian programming sweatshops have been successful.
I too enjoy working with people from other places, and New Zealand has it's share of attractions to the rest of the world. Our current staff (20) do include French, English, Eastern European and Indian, as well as native New Zealanders. Nevertheless, we don't parade those less capable at english in front of our clients too often.
The biggest problem I see with China trying to achieve this is the language barrier.
India has a huge number of english-speaking inhabitants, and universities in India primarily teach in english. This is not the case in China.
A good programmer really needs to understand the problem domain, and it is in english-speaking countries that the most valuable problem-domains will be.
Eastern-european houses are doing fine in Europe because they are all well-used to overcoming language barriers there, but in North America it will be much harder to find bilingual teams.
Of course you don't need a whole team to understand both languages - just your key architects and project managers. There should be some good jobs for bilingual analysts and managers if this does go ahead with any strength.
All partisanship aside, I think this is excellent, and I have been hoping that someone like BBC will do this for some time.
I've been listening to this for the past few hours, and the radio seems excellent. It's kind of rare to listen to English radio here in New Zealand.
Of course if I wanted to be partisan I could also add that I don't like the bloat that comes with Real, and I can't listen to Windows Media on my non-Windows system.
I do hope the BBC continues to offer this choice in the future.
But what I like the most is holidaying while everyone else is working.
Here in New Zealand this is a major time of year for holidays: the roads are packed, the beaches are packed, the shops are packed.
The office, OTOH, is peaceful. I can really get things done, I don't have to worry about dress code, and I can pump up the volume on those OGG audio streams from Radio 1:-)
I tend to take my major holidays in a completely different time of year - May, or October, or something. The roads aren't full of lunatic drivers, everything is cheaper and quieter and I really can relax.
That must almost make it four RH employees on there - well, she's funded (indirectly) by Red Hat anyway!
I can't wait to sue Nokia
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
I have an ADSL modem from Nokia at home, but the Nokia support seems to totally suck.
It appears that as an end-user there are no sites I can visit to download security patches, and there are no mailing lists I can subscribe to which would advise me that I needed an update anyway. Even if I did manage to find updated firmware, the manual that came with the device won't tell me how to install it, and the Nokia marketing^Wwebsite won't let me download any technical documentation.
So if my connection device is compromised, and I get some huge bill for traffic at the end of month as a result, what other recourse will I have?
Slashdot Mirror
Using Mozilla as the basis for their browser is the best decision they could make for their long-term success.
Sure there might be some short-term pain involved, although I rarely see sites that don't work with Mozilla, and nor does my wife who browses more sites and isn't an internet guru.
Our client has publicly stated that when it is completed this software will be released under the GPL. That includes server software supporting geographically separate database replicas, and a full client implementation including management functionality.
It would be interesting to see it used for the .org TLD - currently it is being developed for the .nz ccTLD, but the design is intended to allow for use in any other TLD.
Not particularly difficult to implement.
I've only had it here a couple of days, and I need to set up some network connectivity for it before I can really kick into it...
Man do I wish that the current arsehole using e-mail addresses in my domain would stop doing it.
There appears to be absolutely sweet fuck-all I can do about this abuse of our domain. This is equivalent to identity theft, but how can I find the bastard and sue them for every penny they have?
Do I sound frustrated? You bet!
Could you do this with two firewalls on the machine running inside user-mode linux?
Other than that, I would say get into the network code. You might be better with an older kernel (2.2.x) since the 2.4.x have the fancy zero-copy network stuff which is probably what is your problem.
What about DAV and using davfs to mount things.
Setting up Apache with DAV support is pretty easy.
In fact it is stronger than that. There is absolutely no reason why they need to release any damn thing at all, regardless of whether they use GPL stuff in the code.
The GPL requirement to make the source code available only means that these people would have to make the source code available to their customer . Hardly likely to be a problem, because the customer is likely to be the one making the decision to release in any case.
Andrew.
Although it doesn't have virtual folders, and as far as I can see it doesn't scale quite as well as Evolution.
I have tried both (under Debian GNU/Linux) and I have several folders of mailing lists with around 10,000-15,0000 messages in them using Evolution. I wouldn't try that with Mozilla, but it is better in some other areas, and (in your case) would win out completely in that there is a win32 version.
99.9995% of customers who use Outlook, and who are fundamentally the potential customers for a product like Evolution to replace it, have no idea what news is.
And the geeks would just bitch and moan about how it doesn't do feature X the way Pan does, or rn, or whatever other toy they have been using to read news for the last fifteen years.
Face it: usenet is slowing foundering in the tar pits and is completely irrelevant to a company like Ximian as a way to make money from real customers with serious amounts of green stuff in their back pockets.
I make fairly extensive changes to one of my sites for search engines.
Things I do are:
I have had a number of problems with badly behaved search engines basically DoSing the site as well.
Many search engines are easily identifiable by looking at the HTTP_REFERER, but for some of the stealthier ones you have to identify them by source IP, and of course the technique is only ever going to be 95%.
I really limit the options down and make the site look much like one of those old hierarchical sites of old. After all, the search engine is going to see the whole lot of it and I'm sure it is easier for them to navigate a tree without redundant processing since most of the site navigation is about providing multiple content categorisations of what is basically the same content.
Since many of the organisations that buy these sorts of products have bias, they will select for that bias.Unless some significant market leader can manage to differentiate themselves as lacking in bias then these products will all end up reflecting conservative (american, christian) bias.
This is bad news for schools that want to avoid bias because the products that are most available will tend to be the ones that are successful in the whole market rather than in some underfunded part of it.
I have a 300-baud accoustically coupled modulator demodulator in the cupboard - a leftover from the days when I used to do hardware rather more often than software. I figure on pulling it out in a few years when my son is too old to trash everything, and say something like: "Y'know, Son, back in my day we had to plug the handset into the modem and a-coo-stick-lee couple it to connect to the innanet".
But I don't think that these modern fibre-optic doohickeys are called modems - at least I have never heard any of the techs I've spoken to call them that. Seems kind of right too, since "modem" kind of implies some sort of analog signal to be MOdulated and DEModulated.
And just to get back on topic, since it looks from the other comments like there might be less snake oil involved in the claims of these organisations than I first thought, I really do wonder how well they play with all that GZip encoded content smart websites are delivering nowadays.
They do have technical documentation don't they?
If the service isn't 'snake oil' then it should be possible for them to explain in a reasonable way how the service work, what part of what your modem does that it accelerates.
Me, I'm betting they don't - not that I'm going to bother hitting their site to find out since I ain't someone that cares about modems any longer.
IE surely trashed Netscape 4.x in this regard, but Mozilla has passed IE's performance on this some time ago.
I have an application I have been doing for a client, and IE would just crash for them when they tried to view a table with 20,000 lines in it (they asked for all the results on one page :-) but Mozilla was perfectly happy, rendering the table in around 70 seconds on my PIII 800.
I have also noticed IE performance to be painfully slow rendering :hover CSS background, but I rarely use IE so I don't know where else it might be better/worse.
Is this throwing the baby out with the bath water? Maybe.
I spend a lot of time on the computer, as does my wife. We let my son (4) play on the computer for around 4-6 hours each week, but I would be seriously upset if they had him using a computer at pre-school.
Watching him use the computer, the most difficult problem he has is using the mouse and keyboard. The fine motor skills required almost completely eclipse the difficulty of the problems in the so-called educational software I have seen.
We don't plonk him down in front of the computer in the hope that he is being 'educated' by it - we put him down there at his request, because he enjoys playing the games at Boowa and Kwala, or the games we have bought.
Since we don't own a television, I don't think that the 4-6 hours is too much of a deal. We also supervise the use pretty closely.
No computer use would probably be not enough, in today's world. Since we give him some at home I don't think it's appropriate for him at school yet though - maybe when he's ten.
I find Quanta to work very well for me.
With integrated language references for HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Syntax highlighting for PHP, Perl, SQL and HTML. It works very nicely indeed. Good 'project' grouping as well.
Not a user-interface that really gets in the way - just one that lets me get on with the job.
Quanta development was languishing for a while, but Eric Laffoon has recently taken over and is kicking it back into gear and things are starting to move.
My company has a 100Mbps connection to our ISP across Citylink and it just rocks. We also connect up with a number of clients directly across it.
It cost us a lot of money to connect up, as a small (5-person) company three years ago, but it has been worth every cent.
We also run BGP and peer with many other organisations on Citylink as well. This means we don't get traffic charges for that (we do get charged for traffic volume through our ISP).
This thing has been a great boon for internet businesses in Wellington and we certainly wouldn't have been able to do the things we have done without it.
Citylink also run the New Zealand mirror for Debian, so when I 'apt-get dist-upgrade' I get phenomenal download speeds - around 1500 kb/second
From what I have read elsewhere it seems that the Slashdot effect is exactly what they want to test the streams.
This is the BBC we're talking about: It's like testing a bulldozer for performance by driving it into a wall. Hopefully the wall doesn't slow it down at all :-)
Nevertheless, while I have had bilingual programming staff, I have rarely seen them successfully handle top roles as designers and project managers, where language skill is much more of a barrier.
Here in New Zealand it seems that non native-english-speakers will progress much further in large programming shops than they will in small consulting organisations as well. I suppose too that this is much more the area where the Indian programming sweatshops have been successful.
I too enjoy working with people from other places, and New Zealand has it's share of attractions to the rest of the world. Our current staff (20) do include French, English, Eastern European and Indian, as well as native New Zealanders. Nevertheless, we don't parade those less capable at english in front of our clients too often.
The biggest problem I see with China trying to achieve this is the language barrier.
India has a huge number of english-speaking inhabitants, and universities in India primarily teach in english. This is not the case in China.
A good programmer really needs to understand the problem domain, and it is in english-speaking countries that the most valuable problem-domains will be.
Eastern-european houses are doing fine in Europe because they are all well-used to overcoming language barriers there, but in North America it will be much harder to find bilingual teams.
Of course you don't need a whole team to understand both languages - just your key architects and project managers. There should be some good jobs for bilingual analysts and managers if this does go ahead with any strength.
All partisanship aside, I think this is excellent, and I have been hoping that someone like BBC will do this for some time.
I've been listening to this for the past few hours, and the radio seems excellent. It's kind of rare to listen to English radio here in New Zealand.
Of course if I wanted to be partisan I could also add that I don't like the bloat that comes with Real, and I can't listen to Windows Media on my non-Windows system.
I do hope the BBC continues to offer this choice in the future.
But what I like the most is holidaying while everyone else is working.
Here in New Zealand this is a major time of year for holidays: the roads are packed, the beaches are packed, the shops are packed.
The office, OTOH, is peaceful. I can really get things done, I don't have to worry about dress code, and I can pump up the volume on those OGG audio streams from Radio 1 :-)
I tend to take my major holidays in a completely different time of year - May, or October, or something. The roads aren't full of lunatic drivers, everything is cheaper and quieter and I really can relax.
Merry Christmas!
Isn't Telsa Gwynne Alan Cox's partner?
That must almost make it four RH employees on there - well, she's funded (indirectly) by Red Hat anyway!
I have an ADSL modem from Nokia at home, but the Nokia support seems to totally suck.
It appears that as an end-user there are no sites I can visit to download security patches, and there are no mailing lists I can subscribe to which would advise me that I needed an update anyway. Even if I did manage to find updated firmware, the manual that came with the device won't tell me how to install it, and the Nokia marketing^Wwebsite won't let me download any technical documentation.
So if my connection device is compromised, and I get some huge bill for traffic at the end of month as a result, what other recourse will I have?