Fork are sometimes beneficial, and sometimes not. When forks are beneficial, it can be for a variety of reasons.
In the case of Firefox forking from Mozilla (now called SeaMonkey), the benefit was that Firefox is better for the "average user", and so it has captured much more of the browser market than Mozilla ever did.
The Mozilla foundation minimizes confusion by displaying SeaMonkey much less prominently on the home page and there is no organized promotion for SeaMonkey as there is for Firefox. Most people who know of Firefox have never heard of SeaMonkey.
Any rendering bugs should be exactly the same as in Firefox, as SeaMonkey uses exactly the same rendering engine. SeaMonkey 1.1 uses Gecko 1.8.1, just like Firefox 2.0 does.
There are a fair number of extensions that support SeaMonkey, and are labeled that way. And some extensions that only list Firefox or Thunderbird will work with Seamonkey anyway. If you want to try extension in SeaMonkey, be sure to get the extension uninstaller API extension and the extension manager extension first.
SeaMonkey 1.5 (gecko 1.9) will have much better (but not perfect) extension compatibility and will have extension management built in.
Um, it doesn't use Firefox, it uses the less-than-clean UI of Mozilla. It looks similar to Netscape ver.5 Which is soooo 1995
It does default to the "Classic" theme, but it also comes with the "Modern" theme, which is much nicer. And you can download many other themes from addons.mozilla.org.
I'm sure that it is a great browser, but Mozilla needs to give us the option of which browser to use with the Seamonkey pack.
There is no way to do that and keep the integration, because SeaMonkey is a single executable. You could run Firefox as your browser. and run SeaMonkey for mail, irc and composer, but that would not be any more integrated than Firefox + Thunderbird + Nvu + the Chatzilla extension.
The other option would be to see if there is a theme for SeaMonkey that looks like Firefox, but a theme could not do things like add a separate search box next to the url field.
On a side note, it is probably not really correct to say "Mozilla needs to" in reference to SeaMonkey. Mozilla is providing CVS, bug tracking, etc. for SeaMonkey, but since the name change, SeaMonkey is no longer an official Mozilla product. Like Camino, SeaMonkey is produced and maintained by a separate community (although there is a fair amount of membership overlap).
Re:I've been using vi for so long...
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The common approach is simply to remap the Caps Lock key (a mostly stupid and useless key if there ever was one).
But, but, I thought caps lock was CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
(Typed with the shift key as my caps lock key is an additional ctrl)
I think it will also render PDFs without a plugin I think you are thinking of Cairo's PDF backend rendering target, which just means Web pages will look good when you print them.
I imagine it will eventually do MathML Gecko has supported MathML for a long time.
It is true there was no formal spec, but formulas in ODF generally worked between different apps anyway, and there is a spec now. OpenFormula is now a sub-commitee and the standard should be incorparated into ODF 1.2 (coming soon) or ODF 1.3. Of course, you can still argue whether or not they should have created the spec before producing ODF 1.0.
Try telling some green environmental lefties that Ethanol is a bad thing and show them why, and they turn their nose saying, "But, but, but, but its GREEN!"
Fixed, because I am a green environmental lefty and I am not a fan of ethanol.
Engineer-Poet, I haven't had time time to read all of the article yet, but I started skimming it and it looks very good.
Did you submit it to technocrat and hugg? Worldchanging might also be interested.
That's impressive, the most I ever have open at one time is ~100, typical is 20-50.
Have you considered RSS/ATOM? When I started reading blogs (and planets), I quickly found myself overwhelmed until I discovered Google Reader. I have since switched to Newsfox, a Mozilla extension, and all those blog tabs are reduced to one (the Newsfox tab, or previously the Google Reader tab). Of course this dependes on your news sites have an RSS feed. And some have an RSS feed that only shows the headline or a tiny snippet of the article. What's the point of that?
For all your extension managing needs, try the "Extension Uninstaller API 2.0" extension and the "Extension Manager" extension. Also, when SeaMonkey transitions to XULRunner (hopefully for SeaMonkey 2.0/Gecko 1.9/Firefox 3.0), it will get the standard Firefox extension manager.
Welcome to slashdot, and congrats on your first troll mod! Everyone gets modded as a troll at some point, if for no other reason than that someone in a really bad mood got mod points. And I see you have several highly rated comments already, so this shouldn't hurt your karma that much.
As for the content of your comment, I think it was maybe a little strong (though not really worth a troll mod, IMHO). I would say that the announcement was trying to put KOffice in the best light possible, but you can't really expect them to downplay their release. "probably makes it the best free image editor in the world" is an arguable point (either way), but the statement about OO.o seems basically factual, since they said "in some ways". And I think (based on my reading of various blogs) that the timing of this was a coincidence. That's my feeling, though, and I admit that I have a small bias towards KOffice vs The Gimp and other Office suites.
Should I only contribute if I have something nice to say, or only contribute a negative comment if it's about non-*nix software?
Some might argue yes, given the touchiness of some/.ers towards comments critical of [theirfavoritething], but that would make things pretty dull (and wrong). I would say go ahead and speak your opinion, and be prepared to defend it (and to be modded down anyway at times).
Again, welcome to/. and I hope you stick around, 'cause/. always needs more (basically) reasonable people:-)
I have heard a little talk about KDE on Windows recently (I think the Amarok guys mentioned it the most recently), so I think that is still the plan, although I don't know that it will be a high priority for them. I don't use Windows anymore, but if I did, I know Amarok and KOffice would definitely improve my user experience:-)
Oh, and KMail is not part of KOffice, although maybe it should be to compete with MS Office.
Sorry, you've lost me. What scripts? The Portland xdg-utilities? I know the xdg-utilities don't use dbus (but I did not know that there are issues with using dbus from a script; that's good to be aware of). The Portland Desktop Services API (not yet released) will use dbus, right?
I have heard Gnome and KDE hackers specifically give the movie player/screensaver interaction as example of what dbus can do (if the apps are set up for it; as you say, the dbus libraries and daemons do not know how to interpret the message). Is the knowledge of how to interpret the messages the same thing as the Portland Desktop Services API?
Please enlighten me (seriously; I am not being sarcastic).
Suppose you have a media application that wants to disable the screensaver while it's playing. Now suppose the app is a KDE app, but you're running it under GNOME (or vice versa). Portland makes it simple for the KDE app to contact the GNOME screensaver.
I think that is more like dbus territory (active communication between apps). Portland helps with stuff like making sure that all apps/desktops know what your browser preference is and adding icons and menu entries.
Any code that went back into the tbird base would need have the standard mozilla tri-license (GPL, LGPL, MPL), so that would not affect Debian. However, Thunderbird and Seamonkey (and presumably Sunbird, Camino, etc.) have the exact same logo and trademark problems as Firefox. Just as Firefox will becomeIceWeasle, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey will likely become IceDove and IceApe.
Can you include other namespaces? For example, can you have an ODF file with a big chunk of SVG in it and still call it ODF?
You can include other namespaces. In fact, the ODF standard calls for the use of SVG for vector graphics, MathML for mathematical formulas and Dublin Core for metadata. ODF also uses SMIL, XLink, XForms and other XML standards. Basically, if it existed for XML, they didn't reinvent it.
ODF is forward compatible. ODF 1.1 will be out fairly soon (it adds some tags for accessibility issues), and programs that use 1.0 will simply skip the new tags they don't understand.
Slashdot Mirror
artist renditions of microraptor:
http://images.google.com/images?q=microraptor
Fork are sometimes beneficial, and sometimes not. When forks are beneficial, it can be for a variety of reasons.
In the case of Firefox forking from Mozilla (now called SeaMonkey), the benefit was that Firefox is better for the "average user", and so it has captured much more of the browser market than Mozilla ever did.
The Mozilla foundation minimizes confusion by displaying SeaMonkey much less prominently on the home page and there is no organized promotion for SeaMonkey as there is for Firefox. Most people who know of Firefox have never heard of SeaMonkey.
Any rendering bugs should be exactly the same as in Firefox, as SeaMonkey uses exactly the same rendering engine. SeaMonkey 1.1 uses Gecko 1.8.1, just like Firefox 2.0 does.
There are a fair number of extensions that support SeaMonkey, and are labeled that way. And some extensions that only list Firefox or Thunderbird will work with Seamonkey anyway. If you want to try extension in SeaMonkey, be sure to get the extension uninstaller API extension and the extension manager extension first.
SeaMonkey 1.5 (gecko 1.9) will have much better (but not perfect) extension compatibility and will have extension management built in.
Um, it doesn't use Firefox, it uses the less-than-clean UI of Mozilla. It looks similar to Netscape ver.5 Which is soooo 1995
It does default to the "Classic" theme, but it also comes with the "Modern" theme, which is much nicer. And you can download many other themes from addons.mozilla.org.
I'm sure that it is a great browser, but Mozilla needs to give us the option of which browser to use with the Seamonkey pack.
There is no way to do that and keep the integration, because SeaMonkey is a single executable. You could run Firefox as your browser. and run SeaMonkey for mail, irc and composer, but that would not be any more integrated than Firefox + Thunderbird + Nvu + the Chatzilla extension.
The other option would be to see if there is a theme for SeaMonkey that looks like Firefox, but a theme could not do things like add a separate search box next to the url field.
On a side note, it is probably not really correct to say "Mozilla needs to" in reference to SeaMonkey. Mozilla is providing CVS, bug tracking, etc. for SeaMonkey, but since the name change, SeaMonkey is no longer an official Mozilla product. Like Camino, SeaMonkey is produced and maintained by a separate community (although there is a fair amount of membership overlap).
But, but, I thought caps lock was CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
(Typed with the shift key as my caps lock key is an additional ctrl)
I think it will also render PDFs without a plugin
I think you are thinking of Cairo's PDF backend rendering target, which just means Web pages will look good when you print them.
I imagine it will eventually do MathML
Gecko has supported MathML for a long time.
Cairo right now is miserably slow.
Not anymore.
My intent was to spread information.
w g_abbrev=office-formula
It is true there was no formal spec, but formulas in ODF generally worked between different apps anyway, and there is a spec now. OpenFormula is now a sub-commitee and the standard should be incorparated into ODF 1.2 (coming soon) or ODF 1.3. Of course, you can still argue whether or not they should have created the spec before producing ODF 1.0.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/About_OpenFormul a
Fixed, because I am a green environmental lefty and I am not a fan of ethanol.
Engineer-Poet, I haven't had time time to read all of the article yet, but I started skimming it and it looks very good.
Did you submit it to technocrat and hugg? Worldchanging might also be interested.
That's impressive, the most I ever have open at one time is ~100, typical is 20-50.
Have you considered RSS/ATOM? When I started reading blogs (and planets), I quickly found myself overwhelmed until I discovered Google Reader. I have since switched to Newsfox, a Mozilla extension, and all those blog tabs are reduced to one (the Newsfox tab, or previously the Google Reader tab). Of course this dependes on your news sites have an RSS feed. And some have an RSS feed that only shows the headline or a tiny snippet of the article. What's the point of that?
Anyway, I hope you find a better system.
NO! The Modern theme is required, you heretic! :-)
For all your extension managing needs, try the "Extension Uninstaller API 2.0" extension and the "Extension Manager" extension. Also, when SeaMonkey transitions to XULRunner (hopefully for SeaMonkey 2.0/Gecko 1.9/Firefox 3.0), it will get the standard Firefox extension manager.
I agree about Mozilla, but what does advertising have to do with Opera?
Welcome to slashdot, and congrats on your first troll mod! Everyone gets modded as a troll at some point, if for no other reason than that someone in a really bad mood got mod points. And I see you have several highly rated comments already, so this shouldn't hurt your karma that much.
/.ers towards comments critical of [theirfavoritething], but that would make things pretty dull (and wrong). I would say go ahead and speak your opinion, and be prepared to defend it (and to be modded down anyway at times).
/. and I hope you stick around, 'cause /. always needs more (basically) reasonable people :-)
As for the content of your comment, I think it was maybe a little strong (though not really worth a troll mod, IMHO). I would say that the announcement was trying to put KOffice in the best light possible, but you can't really expect them to downplay their release. "probably makes it the best free image editor in the world" is an arguable point (either way), but the statement about OO.o seems basically factual, since they said "in some ways". And I think (based on my reading of various blogs) that the timing of this was a coincidence. That's my feeling, though, and I admit that I have a small bias towards KOffice vs The Gimp and other Office suites.
Should I only contribute if I have something nice to say, or only contribute a negative comment if it's about non-*nix software?
Some might argue yes, given the touchiness of some
Again, welcome to
I have heard a little talk about KDE on Windows recently (I think the Amarok guys mentioned it the most recently), so I think that is still the plan, although I don't know that it will be a high priority for them. I don't use Windows anymore, but if I did, I know Amarok and KOffice would definitely improve my user experience :-)
Oh, and KMail is not part of KOffice, although maybe it should be to compete with MS Office.
Sorry, you've lost me. What scripts? The Portland xdg-utilities? I know the xdg-utilities don't use dbus (but I did not know that there are issues with using dbus from a script; that's good to be aware of). The Portland Desktop Services API (not yet released) will use dbus, right?
I have heard Gnome and KDE hackers specifically give the movie player/screensaver interaction as example of what dbus can do (if the apps are set up for it; as you say, the dbus libraries and daemons do not know how to interpret the message). Is the knowledge of how to interpret the messages the same thing as the Portland Desktop Services API?
Please enlighten me (seriously; I am not being sarcastic).
Not anymore.
I drank it all.
Suppose you have a media application that wants to disable the screensaver while it's playing. Now suppose the app is a KDE app, but you're running it under GNOME (or vice versa). Portland makes it simple for the KDE app to contact the GNOME screensaver.
I think that is more like dbus territory (active communication between apps). Portland helps with stuff like making sure that all apps/desktops know what your browser preference is and adding icons and menu entries.
Thunderbird will most likely become IceDove.
Any code that went back into the tbird base would need have the standard mozilla tri-license (GPL, LGPL, MPL), so that would not affect Debian. However, Thunderbird and Seamonkey (and presumably Sunbird, Camino, etc.) have the exact same logo and trademark problems as Firefox. Just as Firefox will become IceWeasle, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey will likely become IceDove and IceApe.
But, deep down, you realize, that Steely Dan represents the best music of all time.
:-D
Fixed
What is wrong with an iPod that plays nothing but Steely Dan?
:-)
That's what I was thinking
Last.fm - top artists:
Steely Dan - 13654
They Might be Giants - 4493
Donald Fagen - 3532
Can you include other namespaces? For example, can you have an ODF file with a big chunk of SVG in it and still call it ODF?
You can include other namespaces. In fact, the ODF standard calls for the use of SVG for vector graphics, MathML for mathematical formulas and Dublin Core for metadata. ODF also uses SMIL, XLink, XForms and other XML standards. Basically, if it existed for XML, they didn't reinvent it.
ODF is forward compatible. ODF 1.1 will be out fairly soon (it adds some tags for accessibility issues), and programs that use 1.0 will simply skip the new tags they don't understand.