There are several massive logical ballsups here, made by the linker and the linkee.
1) Not all exploits are created equal. Look at the number of those Moz exploits rated by Secunia as 'Extremely Severe' or 'Critical' compared to those for IE.
2) Mozilla Firefox is not bug free. No piece of software is bug free, and only a mentally retarded moron would believe otherwise. What is important is not that security flaws get found, but (a) how open the organisation is about the flaw [full disclosure] and (b) timeliness of fixes.
3) Mozilla believes in full disclosure, Microsoft does not.
4) The average time taken to patch a flaw in Firefox is two days. IE has unpatched vulnerabilities going back SIX YEARS.
5) Critical components of Firefox run in an sandboxed unprivileged space. When Firefox flaws are discovered, the damage done is minimised. IE runs everything with administrator privileges. When IE is exploited (regularly), a full-on system-rape inevitably follows.
6) ActiveX. The unsafe system by which 90% of spyware, adware, trojans, porn diallers etc. enter your system. Guess which browser has ActiveX turned on by default? Yes, IE. Firefox doesn't support ActiveX because it's just too bloody dangerous.
The security arguments being made about IE vs Firefox in that argument are unreconstructed luddite ballacks.
Although, honestly, we all know security is not the reason we geeks like Firefox. We like it because OMG 3XT3NSI0NZ!!!
When you put a date of '2018' on something, being at least two US administrations away, isn't that akin to basically saying "maybe, one day, but I wouldn't count on it"?
I wish we could be honest. Nobody really can be bothered to put a man on the Moon or Mars. It's faster, cheaper and easier to have a little wheeled avatar nipping around for us, searching out prime real estate and letting us know that the nightlife in these places isn't a patch on Vauxhall, daahling.
I mean, I'd like it to happen, but we all know it won't, right?
All I know is that the Uncyclopedia article on Slashdot favorite, Wil Wheaton is approximately the funniest thing I have ever read. It has me bent over in paroxysms of hilarity just thinking about it.
Well, given that Mozilla never achieved any significant market share, and Firefox took off because Moz moved away from monolithic preference-hell, the evidence seems to suggest you are wrong.
There might be a nice market amongst luddites and regressives, and those who think they are sticking it "to the man" by using something with such an aging and nasty interface.
But other than that? I dunno.
I would have thought the devs could have found better projects to turn their resources to.
It comes as something of a surprise that Steve Ballmer doesn't know how to spell the word "fuck".
Or maybe "f***ing" is the poster's way of representing Ballmer's dribbling, shouting, flobbing, ranting, malsonorous splange of words laughingly called his voice.
I think Mr Smirl has gone into elaborate detail on the necessity of 3d accelerated desktops. The least you can do is the courtesy of reading his article.
Leave it to John Siracusa, of Ars Technica, to explain how Quartz 2D extreme works:
Quartz 2D Extreme
When we have an X with a level of fully-3d-accelerated OpenGL sophistication which is within an order of magnitude of Quartz 2D Extreme's I will be happy.
But I have no doubt we will get there; It just takes time to undo the years of missteps and legacy crap built into X.
Quartz refers specifically to the Display PDF-with-OpenGL backend, which is roughly comparable to X, less network transparency, which I am well aware is a *big thing for X*, but even so...
Aqua is the Mac OS X GUI, and how it compares to KDE/GNOME is an eternal religious war I don't want to get into.
However, there are few who would say that X is better than Quartz as it currently stand.
I don't need to suppose. I have seen and used a fully 3d accelerated desktop on both Longhorn Beta 1, and Mac OS X Tiger with Quartz 2D Extreme enabled.
They are both impressive enough, but more importantly, they do things that X simply *cannot* at this time.
Two years ago at FOSDEM, the Xorg fork had just occurred, and there was much excitement. Maybe this time, free from the shackles of the X consortium and XFree86, X would actually improve to the point where we can be proud, and snicker at our Mac OS X using chums and say "Why can't Quartz do this then, eh?"
Unfortunately, the way I read this article is:
1) Linux Graphics is a bloody mess.
2) X is still an embarassment, five years behind (at least) what Quartz and Avalon are capable of.
3) Nobody has the time, manpower or inclination to fix it.
Ah tits.
Ten years ago, we were having the discussion about X being b0rken. In ten years time will we still be having this discussion?
Plus ca change...?
Actually I am still excited about X's future. Yes, X development stagnated pretty badly under XFree86. But things are moving along nicely now that X development is being conducted at X.org.
The state of Linux Graphics isn't a mess. The controversy this article caused on LKML shows that many people are talking and working together and feel that things are improving. It may not be close to what Quartz is capable of yet. But it is still moving the right way.
The Big Iron vendors let X stagnate because they never ever seemed understand the desktop space. Stupidly, they let Bill and his minions stroll in and take it over before they really had any chance to grasp what a mistake they'd made.
Then XFree86 let X stagnate further, thinking of itself as some exclusive Gentleman's Club.
Fortunately, the foundations of X are right. Simple, modular, highly extensible. If there's one thing the Unix Way gets right, it's simple, modular and extensible.
Now, perhaps, X has finally space to really thrive and grow.
I reckon the Slashdot will still be having "X Suxx0rs!!!" flamewars in 10 years. I hope also that those trolls will be even more wrong than they are now.
Perhaps my terminal optimism is sweetly naive, but I sincerely hope and expect X to go from being "just-about-ok" now to leaving Mac OX smoking dead in the dust in the next few years.
It's not about genetics, it's about the Peter Principle, which is still very much alive and well in our Great Corporate Republics.
Due to companies using promotion as a reward for competence, people tend to rise to their own level of incompetence and then stay there. Hence the profusion of PHBs.
There is a corollary to that, the Dilbert Principle, which is the people who are incompetent *should be* promoted, to prevent them from directly affecting the customer's experience.
These two should be considered the First Law of Management, and its most important corollary.
It's all well and good, as we geeks love to feel superior to management-sorts and snicker at them at every available opportunity.
However, this man comes across as something of a luddite. Much of his opposition to certain phrases is decidedly ludden.
What's wrong with "email" as a noun? "E-mail Message" is long and pointless, when Huffman coding suggest it can be shortened to "E-mail" or just "Mail".
In addition to that opposition, he seems to have a limited grasp of Idiom, Synecdoche, Zeugma and other long-established English literary traditions.
What's wrong with calling an iPod "sexy"? How can one meaningfully be opposed to "poor customer service"? "Reject"? "Requeue"?
He sounds like a lunatic complaining at any kind of neologism or idiom he didn't have a hand in. Like people who complain about the change in the meaning of the words "gay" and "pussy".
I'm tempted to say "grow up!" at him.
Also, a Detention Centre isn't a prison. "Ramp up" is an idiom. It doesn't simply mean "to increase". It means to start something small, and the increase gradually to full capacity. Perhaps we should stay that instead?
"To drill down" is a well-established idiom. What's the problem?
It's bonkers. This man seems to have an absurd overreaction to many perfectly innocuous words and phrases. Whether born out of Luddism or some paranoid objection to all neologisms isn't clear, but I'd suggest that this man be ignored as a quack.
Also, it may be "notorious" for being easy to maintain. However, this just isn't the case.
Of late, whenever I do an "emerge -u system", I have to spend days firefighting the inevitable borkage.
That's, of course, assuming that the emerge completes at all. Invariably, ebuilds are not properly tested, and will fail halfway through leaving my machine in an even more spacked-up state than to begin with.
And then it takes eight bloody hours to install a new version of Firefox. Urgh.
I admit it, I was wrong. I was attracted to Gentoo because I thought it would make me l33t and cool. Wrong. It's just a tossing nightmare!
This weekend, I'm returning mr rig to the warm, welcoming, bosomy folds of a certain Hoary Hedgehog.
Is that the problem with this picoscillatory nanoids is that their normal modes have a tendency to reverse the polarity of the neutron flux through the quantum mass matrix.
This has the unfortunate effect that at that point, you have little choice when determining the altoid-dense uberstate discrepancy to assume that the entire universe weighs exactly the same as Cheryl Tweedie from Girls Aloud.
Well, it's not much of a review. Notwithstanding the obvious anti-DS bias (which is obvious from the outset) being unhelpful in a shootout review, they also missed the fundamental point that the Nintendo DS does have analog control!
Perhaps they missed the thumbstrap in their box? I found that it offered fantastic control of Mario 64 DS and the Metroid Prime demo, and whilst it feels weird at first, I find it more comfortable than the PSP analog control once I had adjusted.
You're not supposed to be playing Mario 64 DS with the stylus!
Also, the load times and battery times on the PSP aren't that bad. Yet, the selection of games for the PSP at launch is dreadful, whereas the DS titles at least have some charm.
I have bought both machines (Erk, Geek). And I love them both. I'm not sure I'd want to be forced to choose, but the DS is definitely the most fun machine.
The Council of Ministers is one of the two legislative chambers of the EU, along with the Parliament. In addition to making legislation under co-decision with the Parliament (meaning that Parliament and Council have to agree), it also sets policy and strategic development for the EU, and nominates Commissioners (the executive branch).
The Council of Ministers basically represents government ministers of the different nation states, depending on which capacity it's meeting in. For example, Prime Ministers and Presidents when it's the European Council, Finance ministers when it's ECOFIN.
Voting in the Council is by qualified majority. However, if something is agreed to be a "common position", no vote is held.
The chamber isn't democratic, but is made up of democratically elected ministers. So, it's secondary democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
What drivel.
There are several massive logical ballsups here, made by the linker and the linkee.
1) Not all exploits are created equal. Look at the number of those Moz exploits rated by Secunia as 'Extremely Severe' or 'Critical' compared to those for IE.
2) Mozilla Firefox is not bug free. No piece of software is bug free, and only a mentally retarded moron would believe otherwise. What is important is not that security flaws get found, but (a) how open the organisation is about the flaw [full disclosure] and (b) timeliness of fixes.
3) Mozilla believes in full disclosure, Microsoft does not.
4) The average time taken to patch a flaw in Firefox is two days. IE has unpatched vulnerabilities going back SIX YEARS.
5) Critical components of Firefox run in an sandboxed unprivileged space. When Firefox flaws are discovered, the damage done is minimised. IE runs everything with administrator privileges. When IE is exploited (regularly), a full-on system-rape inevitably follows.
6) ActiveX. The unsafe system by which 90% of spyware, adware, trojans, porn diallers etc. enter your system. Guess which browser has ActiveX turned on by default? Yes, IE. Firefox doesn't support ActiveX because it's just too bloody dangerous.
The security arguments being made about IE vs Firefox in that argument are unreconstructed luddite ballacks.
Although, honestly, we all know security is not the reason we geeks like Firefox. We like it because OMG 3XT3NSI0NZ!!!
So squish.
Martin
When you put a date of '2018' on something, being at least two US administrations away, isn't that akin to basically saying "maybe, one day, but I wouldn't count on it"?
I wish we could be honest. Nobody really can be bothered to put a man on the Moon or Mars. It's faster, cheaper and easier to have a little wheeled avatar nipping around for us, searching out prime real estate and letting us know that the nightlife in these places isn't a patch on Vauxhall, daahling.
I mean, I'd like it to happen, but we all know it won't, right?
Martin
All I know is that the Uncyclopedia article on Slashdot favorite, Wil Wheaton is approximately the funniest thing I have ever read. It has me bent over in paroxysms of hilarity just thinking about it.
Wil Wheaton
Martin
Well, given that Mozilla never achieved any significant market share, and Firefox took off because Moz moved away from monolithic preference-hell, the evidence seems to suggest you are wrong.
There might be a nice market amongst luddites and regressives, and those who think they are sticking it "to the man" by using something with such an aging and nasty interface.
But other than that? I dunno.
I would have thought the devs could have found better projects to turn their resources to.
Martin
I think maybe some overreactive mod missed my point.
I understand the *what* and *how* of Seamonkey, I don understand the *why*.
I'm not sure why anyone is bothering to keep Seamonkey alive, in these post-Firefox times.
Please contro, your twitches, Trollmods.
Martin
I understand the *what* and the *how*, I'm just not surely I really understand the *why*.
A chacun a son gout, I suppose.
Martin
Netcraft has unconfirmed it: Apple is *not* dying.
I think Apple must now hold the record for the longest period of time a company has been not going out of business.
I® for® one® welcome® our® new®...
I can't be bothered with this.
[Something about a beowulf cluster of these goes here]
Martin
It comes as something of a surprise that Steve Ballmer doesn't know how to spell the word "fuck".
Or maybe "f***ing" is the poster's way of representing Ballmer's dribbling, shouting, flobbing, ranting, malsonorous splange of words laughingly called his voice.
Nice man.
Honestly, did you RTFA?
I think Mr Smirl has gone into elaborate detail on the necessity of 3d accelerated desktops. The least you can do is the courtesy of reading his article.
It's very good.
Leave it to John Siracusa, of Ars Technica, to explain how Quartz 2D extreme works:
Quartz 2D Extreme
When we have an X with a level of fully-3d-accelerated OpenGL sophistication which is within an order of magnitude of Quartz 2D Extreme's I will be happy.
But I have no doubt we will get there; It just takes time to undo the years of missteps and legacy crap built into X.
I think you may be confusing Quartz with Aqua.
Quartz refers specifically to the Display PDF-with-OpenGL backend, which is roughly comparable to X, less network transparency, which I am well aware is a *big thing for X*, but even so...
Aqua is the Mac OS X GUI, and how it compares to KDE/GNOME is an eternal religious war I don't want to get into.
However, there are few who would say that X is better than Quartz as it currently stand.
I don't need to suppose. I have seen and used a fully 3d accelerated desktop on both Longhorn Beta 1, and Mac OS X Tiger with Quartz 2D Extreme enabled.
They are both impressive enough, but more importantly, they do things that X simply *cannot* at this time.
I do, however, hope and expect this to change.
It's useless. It's GPL'd, but requires you to link against a proprietary library.
You cannot even run Looking Glass without being in violation of the GPL.
Two years ago at FOSDEM, the Xorg fork had just occurred, and there was much excitement. Maybe this time, free from the shackles of the X consortium and XFree86, X would actually improve to the point where we can be proud, and snicker at our Mac OS X using chums and say "Why can't Quartz do this then, eh?"
Unfortunately, the way I read this article is:
1) Linux Graphics is a bloody mess.
2) X is still an embarassment, five years behind (at least) what Quartz and Avalon are capable of.
3) Nobody has the time, manpower or inclination to fix it.
Ah tits.
Ten years ago, we were having the discussion about X being b0rken. In ten years time will we still be having this discussion?
Plus ca change...?
Actually I am still excited about X's future. Yes, X development stagnated pretty badly under XFree86. But things are moving along nicely now that X development is being conducted at X.org.
The state of Linux Graphics isn't a mess. The controversy this article caused on LKML shows that many people are talking and working together and feel that things are improving. It may not be close to what Quartz is capable of yet. But it is still moving the right way.
The Big Iron vendors let X stagnate because they never ever seemed understand the desktop space. Stupidly, they let Bill and his minions stroll in and take it over before they really had any chance to grasp what a mistake they'd made.
Then XFree86 let X stagnate further, thinking of itself as some exclusive Gentleman's Club.
Fortunately, the foundations of X are right. Simple, modular, highly extensible. If there's one thing the Unix Way gets right, it's simple, modular and extensible.
Now, perhaps, X has finally space to really thrive and grow.
I reckon the Slashdot will still be having "X Suxx0rs!!!" flamewars in 10 years. I hope also that those trolls will be even more wrong than they are now.
Perhaps my terminal optimism is sweetly naive, but I sincerely hope and expect X to go from being "just-about-ok" now to leaving Mac OX smoking dead in the dust in the next few years.
To pedantically correct the original poster, there are *at least* six states of matter, possibly more.
1) Solid
2) Liquid
3) Gas
4) Plasma
5) Bose-Einstein condensate
6) Fermionic condensate
I now take my Physics-pedant hat off and apologise.
I haven't actually owned a machine with a floppy drive in four years. It's been a similar length of time since I held a floppy disk.
Are PC manufacturers still selling machines with floppies?
That strikes me as a bit bonkers, if so.
I *heart* my SuperDrive.
Martin
It's not about genetics, it's about the Peter Principle, which is still very much alive and well in our Great Corporate Republics.
Due to companies using promotion as a reward for competence, people tend to rise to their own level of incompetence and then stay there. Hence the profusion of PHBs.
There is a corollary to that, the Dilbert Principle, which is the people who are incompetent *should be* promoted, to prevent them from directly affecting the customer's experience.
These two should be considered the First Law of Management, and its most important corollary.
It's all well and good, as we geeks love to feel superior to management-sorts and snicker at them at every available opportunity.
However, this man comes across as something of a luddite. Much of his opposition to certain phrases is decidedly ludden.
What's wrong with "email" as a noun? "E-mail Message" is long and pointless, when Huffman coding suggest it can be shortened to "E-mail" or just "Mail".
In addition to that opposition, he seems to have a limited grasp of Idiom, Synecdoche, Zeugma and other long-established English literary traditions.
What's wrong with calling an iPod "sexy"? How can one meaningfully be opposed to "poor customer service"? "Reject"? "Requeue"?
He sounds like a lunatic complaining at any kind of neologism or idiom he didn't have a hand in. Like people who complain about the change in the meaning of the words "gay" and "pussy".
I'm tempted to say "grow up!" at him.
Also, a Detention Centre isn't a prison. "Ramp up" is an idiom. It doesn't simply mean "to increase". It means to start something small, and the increase gradually to full capacity. Perhaps we should stay that instead?
"To drill down" is a well-established idiom. What's the problem?
It's bonkers. This man seems to have an absurd overreaction to many perfectly innocuous words and phrases. Whether born out of Luddism or some paranoid objection to all neologisms isn't clear, but I'd suggest that this man be ignored as a quack.
That's like as powerful as *fifty* PlayStation 3s, all working together!!!
Can you imagine?
Also, it may be "notorious" for being easy to maintain. However, this just isn't the case.
Of late, whenever I do an "emerge -u system", I have to spend days firefighting the inevitable borkage.
That's, of course, assuming that the emerge completes at all. Invariably, ebuilds are not properly tested, and will fail halfway through leaving my machine in an even more spacked-up state than to begin with.
And then it takes eight bloody hours to install a new version of Firefox. Urgh.
I admit it, I was wrong. I was attracted to Gentoo because I thought it would make me l33t and cool. Wrong. It's just a tossing nightmare!
This weekend, I'm returning mr rig to the warm, welcoming, bosomy folds of a certain Hoary Hedgehog.
Good to see that Larry McVoy has ascended to new, never before seen levels of cunt.
I always knew he had it in him.
I think he deserves a round of applause.
Is that the problem with this picoscillatory nanoids is that their normal modes have a tendency to reverse the polarity of the neutron flux through the quantum mass matrix.
This has the unfortunate effect that at that point, you have little choice when determining the altoid-dense uberstate discrepancy to assume that the entire universe weighs exactly the same as Cheryl Tweedie from Girls Aloud.
Hooray for physics.
Well, it's not much of a review. Notwithstanding the obvious anti-DS bias (which is obvious from the outset) being unhelpful in a shootout review, they also missed the fundamental point that the Nintendo DS does have analog control!
Perhaps they missed the thumbstrap in their box? I found that it offered fantastic control of Mario 64 DS and the Metroid Prime demo, and whilst it feels weird at first, I find it more comfortable than the PSP analog control once I had adjusted.
You're not supposed to be playing Mario 64 DS with the stylus!
Also, the load times and battery times on the PSP aren't that bad. Yet, the selection of games for the PSP at launch is dreadful, whereas the DS titles at least have some charm.
I have bought both machines (Erk, Geek). And I love them both. I'm not sure I'd want to be forced to choose, but the DS is definitely the most fun machine.
And for me, I want a games machine to be fun.
The Council of Ministers is one of the two legislative chambers of the EU, along with the Parliament. In addition to making legislation under co-decision with the Parliament (meaning that Parliament and Council have to agree), it also sets policy and strategic development for the EU, and nominates Commissioners (the executive branch).
The Council of Ministers basically represents government ministers of the different nation states, depending on which capacity it's meeting in. For example, Prime Ministers and Presidents when it's the European Council, Finance ministers when it's ECOFIN.
Voting in the Council is by qualified majority. However, if something is agreed to be a "common position", no vote is held.
The chamber isn't democratic, but is made up of democratically elected ministers. So, it's secondary democracy.