Wasn't it better to fix crucial Gecko bugs before doing any crucial architecture changes?
IANAMD (I am not a Moz developer), but I believe one of the problems is that some things in Gecko cam't be fixed without redoing the architecture. By every account I've read, most of the Gecko codebase is a mess.
we should expect that after 1.7 Phoenix's Gecko will be diferent than Minotaur's one
Huh? Do you even know *anything* about how Moz/Phoenix/etc. work? Gecko is developed as a component which is embedded in applications, not as a part of applications themselves. Hence, there won't be a "Phoenix Gecko" and a "Minotaur Gecko". There will be Gecko, and Phoenix and Minotaur will embed it. From what I've read, installing them both on the same machine will likely have them share a common Gecko install, they won't even install two copies of it.
Not to mention that they want the Mail app to be able to stand alone or embed in Phoenix according to the user's wishes . . .
Did you even read the articles? Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Just for you:
Phoenix is simply smaller, faster, and better -- especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community, but because it has a strong "add-on" extension mechanism.
Several crucial tools integrated with the XPFE-based browser, the DOM inspector and Venkman (the JavaScript Debugger), must be supported in the new, Phoenix-based browser, as add-ons.
And so on. It seems they're trying to produce a couple of applications with a common, handy feature set, and allow you to tack things on voluntarily as you need them. Mozilla already does this to some extent with its plugins and add-ons.
Also, your list of "all the features" probably includes nothing that won't be in the default installs of Minotaur and Phoenix. Nothing you mentioned is really an "advanced" feature, nor did those things take "years" to get into the Moz suite.
Perhaps I don't understand the history, but it looks really bad for Moz to simply randomly crash on two of the biggest name-brand computers out there. What gives?
You don't understand the history. Copy/paste this link (since Bugzilla won't accept Slashdot referers) and take note of the fact that THIS IS A BUG WITH ATI'S SOFTWARE, not with Mozilla. That fact is also pointed out in the "Known Problems" part of the release notes.
Personally, I think it looks relly bad for ATI to release crap drivers.
I have two words for you: binary compatibility. If the new release means things compiled for older releases will not work, then they bump the major version (i.e., 8 to 9). If not, they bump the minor version (i.e., 7.2 to 7.3).
Red Hat 9 includes a new threads implementation that breaks compatibility, most notably with things like Java VMs and WINE. So, they bumped the major version.
See this mailing list post by RH manager Matt Wilson for more on the reasoning behind the numbering.
Well now, that's odd. It seemed to me that Red Hat 8's font rendering was light-years ahead of 7.3's. The anti-aliasing out of the box is a very nice thing, and some of the sub-pixel AA stuff that can be done now is just as good as Windows' ClearType, IMO.
And as for "current" = "supported", I'd have to disagree. The 1.0 Linux kernel is still "supported"; does that mean it's fair to compare its feature set with, say, the XP kernel as "two current OS kernels"? True, 7.3 is probably the most stable "recent" release of Red Hat out there right now; the box I'm typing this on is still on 7.2, because it was rock-solid and I don't yet need all the eye candy of 8. But given the impending release of Red Hat 9, and the impending EOL of the 7.x series, I don't think it's fair to talk about it as if it were the latest and greatest release. Window NT 4 is still in use, but it's been EOL'd by MS; would you have considered it "current" up until the time support was cut off?
since you can chose not to install all of the above, I still don't get it...
Observe this sad fact: the Mail application cannot be installed on its own. In order to have any particular part of Mozilla, you must install at least the browser. So if you just want the mail client, you're up the creek with no paddle until Minotaur gets a stable release out the door; the whole point of projects like Phoenix and Minotaur is that you can get just the app you want, without the entire Mozilla suite and backend code, which is a nice thing for some of us . . .
All I know is that I use a Sun for my desktop instead of my RedHat 7.3 box precisely because Sun's fonts are so much better than the ones in RedHat 7.3.
I don't know, man . . . the fonts on my RH9 beta box look a heck of a lot better than the fonts on my Solaris 3 box. Or maybe I shouldn't compare a current release of one OS with an older release of another?
In windows you just drag and drop the font into the Fonts folder of the control panel.
I don't know about your Linux distros, but in Red Hat you just drag and drop the file into ~/.fonts. No muss, not fuss. Now, what were you sayign again?
I see . . . now, I'm going to go write a PERL script that allows anyone in the world to download/etc/passwd. After I've done that I'll put up "PERL IS INSCURE! PERL FULL OF SECUrITY FLAWS! USE PERL AND GET R00TED!" pages all over the web, so I can make exactly the same argument . . .
Seriously, if you turn on safe mode (which is enabled by default on all recent versions of PHP) and have half a brain, PHP's just as secure as anything else out there. If you're brain-dead and set register_globals on, don't validate incoming data, etc., then you deserve what you get; don't blame it on the language.
My site's URL is "ubernostrum.dyndns.org"; I am neither an organization nor is my actual name "ubernostrum"; am I committing fraud by misleading people who are really looking for information on ubernostrum?
Is Geocities committing fraud? I was looking for information on geologically-interesting cities, and they misled me -- here it's actually a place where you can get a free website.
Frankly, the domain name system isn't perfect; domain names get assigned to things that have nothing to do with the actual name at times. That doesn't mean we need a law making such practices fraud; the repercussions of that, as I hope you can see, would be ludicrous. What we do need is for people to get a clue when it comes to using the Internet; if a person driving down the highway displayed the same level of ignorance about cars and driving as the average Web user displays about computers and the Internet, people would be dying in horrific accidents by the millions. Yet in the case of the Internet, folks just seem to shrug and say "well, computers are hard", or call for ridiculously stupid laws to protect them from their own stupidity, and that's the dangerous fraud being perpetrated.
don't they still have to keep the html renderer (Gecko) if they want to render emails that contain html ?
Yes, but the point is they don't need to keep the IRC client, the WYSIWYG HTML editor, the Web browser interface, the JavaScript debugger, the DOM Inspector . ..
But they cut out a bunch of KDE notices and now there are only 4.23x10^8 references to the KDE Project in Red Hat's KDE, instead of the standard 9.62x10^12! That's the same as not giving KDE any credit at all! So how can you say it's "wonderful"?
The average home user would freak out if they had to deal with this kind of complexity, and not buy 2k/XP/whatever. Or they'd forget the admin password and have to reinstall Windows, and not buy the next version.
So why have a pssword at all? It just complicates the user's life because he has to remember it or, worse, write it down somewhere.
Microsoft really ought to do their users a favor and just do away with user authentication; only advanced users really need it, and they can find it buried in Start -> Programs -> Admin -> Security -> Programs -> Admin -> Local Policy - Policies -> Passwords -> Admin -> Password Restrictions -> Dictionary Options . . . it practically glares out at you from there.
Please tell me how it's MS's fault that people pick easy to guess passwords?
Well, it's not necessarily their fault, but I'm used to my Linux box where I'm not allowed, for example, to select a word in the dictionary as a password. On MS OSes, having some sort of feature to disallow exceedingly weak passwords wouldn't be too hard to implement and could do a lot for the security of the system . . . heck, just a simple routine that disallows "admin" and "password" would probably take care of half the machines that have been infected by this thing.
In fact, the condition upon which GPLed software is issued is that derivative products are licensed the same way. The derived code =is= GPL'ed whether Castle agrees or not. So, the binaries are freely distributable under the GPL and so is the source, its just that Castle is illegally holding it captive.
No. The condition the GPL imposes is that you may do what you like with the code, but the only legal right you have to distribute it or a derivative work comes if you license such work under the GPL. If you do not do so, the GPL doesn't forcefully impose itself on your code, it just declares that you have no right to distribute and you become liable for copyright infringement. Please actually read the license before spouting off about what you think it does.
If this derivative work was created by making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work, then any copyright claim on this work is invalid, and we're all free to copy and distribute it as we see fit. Contrariwise, we could interpret the current situation to mean that the authors did accept the terms of the GPL, and that the derivative work is, in fact, licensed by the GPL-- as all derivative works made from GPL-licensed works must necessarily be-- in which case we're free to copy and distribute it as we see fit.
No, actually. If you do not accept the terms of the GPL (which is obvious if you're incorporating GPL code into a proprietary product), then you have no legal right to distribute the proprietary product. Neither does anyone else; the only legal way to distribute something which has been released under the GPL is under the GPL. Take the GPL away and no one can distribute.
As has been pointed out, my analogy could have been better. Here goes:
You break into my house, go to my computer, and steal the monitor. You take it home and hook it up to your own computer. Do I now have the right to take your entire computer (i.e., case, CPU, peripherals, etc.)?
That's the problem. And the GPL is clear on this point, too; if you don't accept the license terms, distributin gdoesn't put your work under the GPL, it's a copyright infringement and you have to be barred from distribution.
But honestly, I have very little sympathy for people who complain that accomodation holds back development. As a business you're goal is not standards compliancy or the accomodation of older browsers, it's to make money. And there's a balance there.
Really? What balance is being thrown off by a gracefully degrading page? None. Hence I see businesses which accomodate old browsers with multiple separate pages and oodles of browser-sniffing scripting as deliberately holding back web development for no good reason whatsoever. Accomodate them by designing a page that still looks OK in old browsers, but pixel-perfect is a waste of time, money, and bandwidth for an unreasonable and in some cases unattainable design goal; is it good business sense to throw away resources like that? If your boss thinks so, maybe he needs a performance review.
Actually that's exactly how it works. For better or for worse.
Nope. Consider the physical-property equivalent: I steal something from you. Do you have the right to come steal it back? No. Similarly, if they "steal" GPL'd code, we don't have a right to steal it back; the legally correct course of action is to file suit, get an injunction against distribution of the stolen code, and recoup losses from the infringer.
At the most, it usually takes a few conditional PHP statements to create a page that renders 99% the same in almost all browsers, and keeps customer complaints to a minimum. I really don't care if you choose to do it another way.
I guess I just don't get this "keep complaints to a minimum" tactic. If I went into a CD store and complained that the discs they sell won't play on my Victrola, they'd laugh me out of the store. But if I go to a website in a browser that's close to a decade old and complain that it doesn't render properly, some web designers will fall all over themselves trying to fix it for me. Why? Make your pages gracefully degrade, add a browser upgrade message if you're really politically-minded, and leave it at that.
On the other hand, if you keep designing different versions of pages for different browsers, you'll hold back web design and technology (people like you are the reason why CSS1 is a 7-year-old standard that I still can't use to its fullest effect) while not really doing anyone a service.
But if you really want to do it that way, it's your prerogative. Have fun in the Stone Age . . .
Slashdot Mirror
IANAMD (I am not a Moz developer), but I believe one of the problems is that some things in Gecko cam't be fixed without redoing the architecture. By every account I've read, most of the Gecko codebase is a mess.
we should expect that after 1.7 Phoenix's Gecko will be diferent than Minotaur's one
Huh? Do you even know *anything* about how Moz/Phoenix/etc. work? Gecko is developed as a component which is embedded in applications, not as a part of applications themselves. Hence, there won't be a "Phoenix Gecko" and a "Minotaur Gecko". There will be Gecko, and Phoenix and Minotaur will embed it. From what I've read, installing them both on the same machine will likely have them share a common Gecko install, they won't even install two copies of it.
Not to mention that they want the Mail app to be able to stand alone or embed in Phoenix according to the user's wishes . . .
Well, that and Phoenix is quality-driven. They release when the bugs are fixed.
Phoenix is simply smaller, faster, and better -- especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community, but because it has a strong "add-on" extension mechanism.
Several crucial tools integrated with the XPFE-based browser, the DOM inspector and Venkman (the JavaScript Debugger), must be supported in the new, Phoenix-based browser, as add-ons.
And so on. It seems they're trying to produce a couple of applications with a common, handy feature set, and allow you to tack things on voluntarily as you need them. Mozilla already does this to some extent with its plugins and add-ons.
Also, your list of "all the features" probably includes nothing that won't be in the default installs of Minotaur and Phoenix. Nothing you mentioned is really an "advanced" feature, nor did those things take "years" to get into the Moz suite.
You don't understand the history. Copy/paste this link (since Bugzilla won't accept Slashdot referers) and take note of the fact that THIS IS A BUG WITH ATI'S SOFTWARE, not with Mozilla. That fact is also pointed out in the "Known Problems" part of the release notes.
Personally, I think it looks relly bad for ATI to release crap drivers.
Red Hat 9 includes a new threads implementation that breaks compatibility, most notably with things like Java VMs and WINE. So, they bumped the major version.
See this mailing list post by RH manager Matt Wilson for more on the reasoning behind the numbering.
And as for "current" = "supported", I'd have to disagree. The 1.0 Linux kernel is still "supported"; does that mean it's fair to compare its feature set with, say, the XP kernel as "two current OS kernels"? True, 7.3 is probably the most stable "recent" release of Red Hat out there right now; the box I'm typing this on is still on 7.2, because it was rock-solid and I don't yet need all the eye candy of 8. But given the impending release of Red Hat 9, and the impending EOL of the 7.x series, I don't think it's fair to talk about it as if it were the latest and greatest release. Window NT 4 is still in use, but it's been EOL'd by MS; would you have considered it "current" up until the time support was cut off?
Observe this sad fact: the Mail application cannot be installed on its own. In order to have any particular part of Mozilla, you must install at least the browser. So if you just want the mail client, you're up the creek with no paddle until Minotaur gets a stable release out the door; the whole point of projects like Phoenix and Minotaur is that you can get just the app you want, without the entire Mozilla suite and backend code, which is a nice thing for some of us . . .
I don't know, man . . . the fonts on my RH9 beta box look a heck of a lot better than the fonts on my Solaris 3 box. Or maybe I shouldn't compare a current release of one OS with an older release of another?
I don't know about your Linux distros, but in Red Hat you just drag and drop the file into ~/.fonts. No muss, not fuss. Now, what were you sayign again?
Seriously, if you turn on safe mode (which is enabled by default on all recent versions of PHP) and have half a brain, PHP's just as secure as anything else out there. If you're brain-dead and set register_globals on, don't validate incoming data, etc., then you deserve what you get; don't blame it on the language.
Yet Nike went to court and won a right to lie . . . seems the law has no problem contradicting itself, either.
Is Geocities committing fraud? I was looking for information on geologically-interesting cities, and they misled me -- here it's actually a place where you can get a free website.
Frankly, the domain name system isn't perfect; domain names get assigned to things that have nothing to do with the actual name at times. That doesn't mean we need a law making such practices fraud; the repercussions of that, as I hope you can see, would be ludicrous. What we do need is for people to get a clue when it comes to using the Internet; if a person driving down the highway displayed the same level of ignorance about cars and driving as the average Web user displays about computers and the Internet, people would be dying in horrific accidents by the millions. Yet in the case of the Internet, folks just seem to shrug and say "well, computers are hard", or call for ridiculously stupid laws to protect them from their own stupidity, and that's the dangerous fraud being perpetrated.
Yes, but the point is they don't need to keep the IRC client, the WYSIWYG HTML editor, the Web browser interface, the JavaScript debugger, the DOM Inspector . . .
Gecko is embeddable, and Gecko != browser.
But they cut out a bunch of KDE notices and now there are only 4.23x10^8 references to the KDE Project in Red Hat's KDE, instead of the standard 9.62x10^12! That's the same as not giving KDE any credit at all! So how can you say it's "wonderful"?
Wow, that was almost-but-not-quite funny the first time somebody said it years ago. And I'm sure it's improved with the 5.3x10^7 tellings since.
So why have a pssword at all? It just complicates the user's life because he has to remember it or, worse, write it down somewhere.
Microsoft really ought to do their users a favor and just do away with user authentication; only advanced users really need it, and they can find it buried in Start -> Programs -> Admin -> Security -> Programs -> Admin -> Local Policy - Policies -> Passwords -> Admin -> Password Restrictions -> Dictionary Options . . . it practically glares out at you from there.
Well, it's not necessarily their fault, but I'm used to my Linux box where I'm not allowed, for example, to select a word in the dictionary as a password. On MS OSes, having some sort of feature to disallow exceedingly weak passwords wouldn't be too hard to implement and could do a lot for the security of the system . . . heck, just a simple routine that disallows "admin" and "password" would probably take care of half the machines that have been infected by this thing.
Yes, please do read the thread from the last slashdot discussion. Specifically this comment.
No. The condition the GPL imposes is that you may do what you like with the code, but the only legal right you have to distribute it or a derivative work comes if you license such work under the GPL. If you do not do so, the GPL doesn't forcefully impose itself on your code, it just declares that you have no right to distribute and you become liable for copyright infringement. Please actually read the license before spouting off about what you think it does.
You run a hardware store, and I steal some nails from you. I use them to build a house. Do you have the right to take the whole house?
If I take a subroutine or two illegally from a GPL project, do the original authors have the right to my entire derivative program?
I believe the answer is "no" in both cases...
No, actually. If you do not accept the terms of the GPL (which is obvious if you're incorporating GPL code into a proprietary product), then you have no legal right to distribute the proprietary product. Neither does anyone else; the only legal way to distribute something which has been released under the GPL is under the GPL. Take the GPL away and no one can distribute.
You break into my house, go to my computer, and steal the monitor. You take it home and hook it up to your own computer. Do I now have the right to take your entire computer (i.e., case, CPU, peripherals, etc.)?
That's the problem. And the GPL is clear on this point, too; if you don't accept the license terms, distributin gdoesn't put your work under the GPL, it's a copyright infringement and you have to be barred from distribution.
Really? What balance is being thrown off by a gracefully degrading page? None. Hence I see businesses which accomodate old browsers with multiple separate pages and oodles of browser-sniffing scripting as deliberately holding back web development for no good reason whatsoever. Accomodate them by designing a page that still looks OK in old browsers, but pixel-perfect is a waste of time, money, and bandwidth for an unreasonable and in some cases unattainable design goal; is it good business sense to throw away resources like that? If your boss thinks so, maybe he needs a performance review.
Nope. Consider the physical-property equivalent: I steal something from you. Do you have the right to come steal it back? No. Similarly, if they "steal" GPL'd code, we don't have a right to steal it back; the legally correct course of action is to file suit, get an injunction against distribution of the stolen code, and recoup losses from the infringer.
I guess I just don't get this "keep complaints to a minimum" tactic. If I went into a CD store and complained that the discs they sell won't play on my Victrola, they'd laugh me out of the store. But if I go to a website in a browser that's close to a decade old and complain that it doesn't render properly, some web designers will fall all over themselves trying to fix it for me. Why? Make your pages gracefully degrade, add a browser upgrade message if you're really politically-minded, and leave it at that.
On the other hand, if you keep designing different versions of pages for different browsers, you'll hold back web design and technology (people like you are the reason why CSS1 is a 7-year-old standard that I still can't use to its fullest effect) while not really doing anyone a service.
But if you really want to do it that way, it's your prerogative. Have fun in the Stone Age . . .