Well, recent mozilla builds style the upload text field okay, but the button isn't being styled.
There's actually a whole lot of discussion about this very issue at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52500 (not linked since bugzilla rejects slashdot referers).
You should take a look and perhaps contribute your comments on this if you haven't.
Mozilla already follows IE's behavior when rendering pages that don't declare HTML 4.01 standards compliance, to a very high degree.
Can you actually point to any web pages that don't work properly in Mozilla/NS7? And do they not work because the pages use a feature in IE that Mozilla/NS7 doesn't have, or because the pages have a bug in them that (some versions of) IE don't choke on? Or do they simply refuse to even bother trying to display anything on a non-IE browser?
Honestly, what on the web is broken these days with Mozilla/NS7? Because I just don't run into these pages.
But the Sonys are very nice. They're selling models
with 320x320 resolution at greyscale, with 16 megs of RAM at less than $200. Tiny, huge memory capacity, runs all Palm apps, fast.. what's not to like?
The thing I love about anonymous cowards is how incredibly good they are at failing to recognize irony, subtlety, and wit. It's hilarious.. cute, almost.
Companies sue other companies that they do business with all the time. If ATT.NET dropped RIAA's DNS, RIAA would simply have grounds for an additional suit, depending on the terms of the contract between AT&T and RIAA.
This is such egregious, offensive nonsense. This whole process of the government granting monopolies on who ever is first to rush to the patent office and pay the government for the privilege, no matter how many programmers would declare the idea perfectly obvious.
A few thousand letters to the congress protesting the granting of bad patents would go a long way in sparking reform.
You're arguing that because Microsoft hasn't monopolized every possible software niche, no matter how small or non-lucrative, they must not be all that bad?
That's a very weak argument, isn't it?
Shouldn't the standard be that they are culpable for the acts of illegal monopoly maintenance that they have committed, rather than giving them a pass because they have decided it is not strategically worthwhile to eliminate all other providers of graphics software?
Additionally, every time someone re-implements an algorithm, there is a chance that they will implement it incorrectly. This is especially true in with encryption algorithms. Everyone would be better off if base algorithms weren't re-written by every single company that needs to use them. This is where government funded BSD licensed code (sorry, I haven't researched LGPL enough to know if it solves GPL's problems with sharing code with closed source groups or not) could improve software quality for everyone.
Sure, and that's why software like the OpenSSL libraries are licensed in a way that they can be used by commercial concerns. The BSD license and its ilk are just as Open Source as GPL, and are completely appropriate for many circumstances for many people. If one is trying to establish a free platform alternative to Microsoft, however, the anti-monopolizing protections of something like the GPL plays a very important role.
Runs on...not can run *IN*. If I am doing government research and write an application for analyzing data and invent a new algorithm for doing a mathematical transform that is a few orders of magnitude more efficient, but I just GPL the app, I have just locked 3/4 of the software development world out of this code.
You're confusing the GPL, which is an affirmative grant of use and copy rights, with patent law, which would apply to a bare algorithm. Microsoft would, of course, be perfectly free to re-implement an algorithm that was embodied in a GPL'ed application or library, assuming that it wasn't patented by a free source advocate unclear on the concept.;-)
Assume that someone makes a standalone GPL app for transforming images. MS couldn't take that and integrate it into the display processing because it needs to be a standalone app.
So either:
They can use the software in an inefficient kludgefest of a hack.
or:
They can cleanroom reverse engineer the code.
Hm, I guess $40 billion dollars in the bank doesn't buy as much programmer time as I would have thought, huh?
If they weren't re-writing it, but just dropping it in place, would they have nearly as much temptation to "fix" open standards.
This is naive at best. Programmer time and effort is the smallest of Microsoft's major expenses. The Microsoft R&D budget is structured to cover the sort of marketing expenses required to 'develop' a commanding hold on the market. Microsoft is not going to fail to take an opportunity to lock out competitors because they'll save a few days of some programmer's time.
So now MS extends Collaborate, they have a slight advantage over Intuit and market forces let them charge a little more. Seems entirely fair to me.
Except that computing technology is heavily influenced by network effects. Assuming that Collaborate involves any kind of communication or data file format, every user of MS Collaborate is a tool driving positive network effects to induce more users to purchase and use MS Collaborate in order to interoperate with everyone who received a copy their purchase of MS Windows, thus driving out the original product. Microsoft did precisely this with Kerberos in Windows 2000, then tried to prevent others from knowing what was in those secret n (where n is reasonably low.. 32?) bytes of their ticket datagrams, or from writing any code capable of interoperating.
Now, how does anyone but Microsoft benefit from the secrecy of those 32 bytes? Does anyone imagine that more effort was required to formulate those 32 bytes than was necessary to develop the original Kerberos concept and evolve the code through five major releases? Does anyone not see that Microsoft was laying a cuckoo's egg, to hatch and shove all of the Kerberos servers written and implemented by the original development team (or other commercial licensors) out of the nest?
Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant position in the industry means that it has the monopoly power to drive network effects to its benefit every time. Without licenses like the GPL, does anyone imagine there would be any substantial competition to Microsoft in the commodity platform arena? Why should anyone besides Microsoft disparage Open Source licensing that helps mitigate Microsoft's monopolizing tendencies?
Besides, you are ignoring the fact that the legal issues of GPL require the larger work to be open sourced...MS couldn't use a GPL library inside windows even if they wanted to because they place too much value on maintaining control over the codebase that they paid billions to write and maintain.
Two points. First, GPL'ed software runs on Windows all the time.. see Cygwin, Xemacs, etc. That doesn't lead to a requirement that Windows be licensed under the GPL, anymore than the fact that the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPL means that my copy of DB2 for Linux has to be licensed under the GPL.
Second, remember that people who want to create a standard library will often use the LGPL rather than the GPL. Again and again you'll see that people who are trying to create standard code for interoperability will choose to do it through LGPL or other non-GPL Open Source licenses, or will make provisions for dual licensing.
I did read the ruling and comments, actually. The penalty was vacated because Jackson had mouthed off when he shouldn't have, and because his rush to get to closure without holding penalty hearings didn't sit well with the appeals court. The fact that they vacated Penfield's ruling never meant that the district court judge that took over the case could not set the same penalty, if the DOJ could justify it on the remaining charges.
Bush's DOJ seems to have deliberately sought to get out of litigating against Microsoft, and so declared that based on the rejection of certain of the charges, they would not seek the breakup. That's not to say that the appeals court made that decision, because they didn't.
Of course, the real interesting matter now is what Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will do with the DOJ/MS sweetheart deal and the remaining states' now independent litigation. It's not at all clear that MS will simply get the existing DOJ settlement rubber-stamped.
The Appeals court did not refuse a break-up, they just overturned a fraction of the counts against Microsoft and kicked Penfield Jackson's ass off of the case for his injudicious blathering to the press.
The fact is, MS was convicted on a few counts, most importantly on being an illegally maintained monopoly, opening it up to potential civil liability. This is not nothing.
And any declaration of what MS has won is premature until Kotar-Kelley comes back with her decision in this phase of the proceedings.
If only The Underdogs would at least have the grace to link to games that were also published on other (better) platforms.. it's extremely silly to link to the PC's (CGA!) version of Marble Madness or Arctic Fox when extremely good versions came out for the Amiga, which are perfectly playable on Amiga emulators for the PC these days.
This goes for a great deal of the first half of their historical archives.. any cross platform game that came out before 1988 or so would inevitably have been far better played on the Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 800, Commodore 64, etc.
Well, if so, they'll do well by it. It seems unlikely that as many people would go out and buy a second copy of FoTR (for how much?) as would buy AoTC for the first time.
Neither will the guy who set up this trojan, since it was caught and removed within 6 hours of being inserted.
Fahrenheit 451 Reference, y'all
on
Fahrenheit
·
· Score: 2
In Ray Bradybury's Novel Fahrenheit 451, there was this interactive TV wall thing, where a character watched this soap opera, and every so often, the characters on screen would freeze, turn to the camera, and say in mechanical tones.. 'So, what do you think.. <Frank Smith>'?, waiting for the viewer to say something (anything), whereupon the show continued.. It was a critique of television, and Bradbury's prediction that a bit of fake interactivity could make people total zombies, without even enough free thought to ponder how much meaning or communication was really happening on TV.
So I wonder if that's where they got the name Fahrenheit from. Very ironic, if so.
Well, it's not clear that this state of affairs will continue indefinitely. I just put together a presentation using OpenOffice's Impress module, which is patterened after (and file-compatible with) PowerPoint, and had a pretty darn easy time with it. A whole lot of users could be quite happy and productive with an OpenOffice/Mozilla/KDE desktop, if it came down to it.
The thing is, though, that it would take a fairly large and well supported organization to make that sort of move. Your average consumer has made a decision to go out and pay a thousand dollars or so to be able to run all the cool software at their local Fry's. Paying 900 dollars to not be able to run any of that cool software doesn't make much economic sense for most people. In a well supported organization, though, the computers are to get the work done, and saving a couple hundred dollars times ten thousand employees starts to feel like noticeable cash.
Bought individually, comparable products would cost you an estimated $250:
Anti-virus: $50
Backup: $40
100MB of online storage: $60
15MB of email storage, forwarding and POP/IMAP access: $40+
Home page creation and hosting: $60
Aren't Apple customers supposed to be smart enough to know the difference between a one-time purchase price (Backup certainly, Anti-virus possibly) and yearly expenses? And what Mac OS X viruses are we talking about here, anyway?
The other prices quoted might be reasonable if one were only paying one of those, but once you've got 100megs of online storage, the email storage and the home page creation and hosting would cost rather little, I would think.
Seems like Steve is conducting an experiment to see how much Apple users really, really love him. "If you really loved me, you'd pay $100 dollars a year for a @mac.com address."
Slashdot Mirror
No worries, I don't see most Linux kernel hackers being really anxious to incorporate a bunch of Objective-C code into the kernel, do you? ;-)
Well, recent mozilla builds style the upload text field okay, but the button isn't being styled.
There's actually a whole lot of discussion about this very issue at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52500 (not linked since bugzilla rejects slashdot referers).
You should take a look and perhaps contribute your comments on this if you haven't.
I've constructed file input boxes in mozilla, haven't tried doing much with CSS. Can you give an example?
Really? www.esrb.org works just fine for me in the latest mozilla nightly build on Linux.
What sort of problem in specific are you seeing? What version of mozilla are you running?
Mozilla already follows IE's behavior when rendering pages that don't declare HTML 4.01 standards compliance, to a very high degree.
Can you actually point to any web pages that don't work properly in Mozilla/NS7? And do they not work because the pages use a feature in IE that Mozilla/NS7 doesn't have, or because the pages have a bug in them that (some versions of) IE don't choke on? Or do they simply refuse to even bother trying to display anything on a non-IE browser?
Honestly, what on the web is broken these days with Mozilla/NS7? Because I just don't run into these pages.
But the Sonys are very nice. They're selling models with 320x320 resolution at greyscale, with 16 megs of RAM at less than $200. Tiny, huge memory capacity, runs all Palm apps, fast.. what's not to like?
The thing I love about anonymous cowards is how incredibly good they are at failing to recognize irony, subtlety, and wit. It's hilarious .. cute, almost.
Companies sue other companies that they do business with all the time. If ATT.NET dropped RIAA's DNS, RIAA would simply have grounds for an additional suit, depending on the terms of the contract between AT&T and RIAA.
Gordon Mohr was the CTO of Activerse. I'm sure he'd be happy to help stomp out these nitwits.
This is such egregious, offensive nonsense. This whole process of the government granting monopolies on who ever is first to rush to the patent office and pay the government for the privilege, no matter how many programmers would declare the idea perfectly obvious.
A few thousand letters to the congress protesting the granting of bad patents would go a long way in sparking reform.
Has Microsoft decided that the 1995 consent decree they executed with the Department of Justice no longer applies?
See http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f0000/0047.htm, in particular the per-processor clause.
Microsoft can't really be attempting to force Dell to pay them for every PC shipped, can it?
The PDF format is essentially PostScript with the ability to execute code removed, and a declarative syntax in its place (see http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews5-1.ht ml#feature2
for details).
The PDF file format is open, and many tools have been written to use it without involving Adobe.
You're arguing that because Microsoft hasn't monopolized every possible software niche, no matter how small or non-lucrative, they must not be all that bad?
That's a very weak argument, isn't it?
Shouldn't the standard be that they are culpable for the acts of illegal monopoly maintenance that they have committed, rather than giving them a pass because they have decided it is not strategically worthwhile to eliminate all other providers of graphics software?
Additionally, every time someone re-implements an algorithm, there is a chance that they will implement it incorrectly. This is especially true in with encryption algorithms. Everyone would be better off if base algorithms weren't re-written by every single company that needs to use them. This is where government funded BSD licensed code (sorry, I haven't researched LGPL enough to know if it solves GPL's problems with sharing code with closed source groups or not) could improve software quality for everyone.
Sure, and that's why software like the OpenSSL libraries are licensed in a way that they can be used by commercial concerns. The BSD license and its ilk are just as Open Source as GPL, and are completely appropriate for many circumstances for many people. If one is trying to establish a free platform alternative to Microsoft, however, the anti-monopolizing protections of something like the GPL plays a very important role.
Runs on...not can run *IN*. If I am doing government research and write an application for analyzing data and invent a new algorithm for doing a mathematical transform that is a few orders of magnitude more efficient, but I just GPL the app, I have just locked 3/4 of the software development world out of this code.
You're confusing the GPL, which is an affirmative grant of use and copy rights, with patent law, which would apply to a bare algorithm. Microsoft would, of course, be perfectly free to re-implement an algorithm that was embodied in a GPL'ed application or library, assuming that it wasn't patented by a free source advocate unclear on the concept. ;-)
Assume that someone makes a standalone GPL app for transforming images. MS couldn't take that and integrate it into the display processing because it needs to be a standalone app.
So either:
They can use the software in an inefficient kludgefest of a hack.
or:
They can cleanroom reverse engineer the code.
Hm, I guess $40 billion dollars in the bank doesn't buy as much programmer time as I would have thought, huh?
If they weren't re-writing it, but just dropping it in place, would they have nearly as much temptation to "fix" open standards.
This is naive at best. Programmer time and effort is the smallest of Microsoft's major expenses. The Microsoft R&D budget is structured to cover the sort of marketing expenses required to 'develop' a commanding hold on the market. Microsoft is not going to fail to take an opportunity to lock out competitors because they'll save a few days of some programmer's time.
See http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-835267.html.
So now MS extends Collaborate, they have a slight advantage over Intuit and market forces let them charge a little more. Seems entirely fair to me.
Except that computing technology is heavily influenced by network effects. Assuming that Collaborate involves any kind of communication or data file format, every user of MS Collaborate is a tool driving positive network effects to induce more users to purchase and use MS Collaborate in order to interoperate with everyone who received a copy their purchase of MS Windows, thus driving out the original product. Microsoft did precisely this with Kerberos in Windows 2000, then tried to prevent others from knowing what was in those secret n (where n is reasonably low.. 32?) bytes of their ticket datagrams, or from writing any code capable of interoperating.
Now, how does anyone but Microsoft benefit from the secrecy of those 32 bytes? Does anyone imagine that more effort was required to formulate those 32 bytes than was necessary to develop the original Kerberos concept and evolve the code through five major releases? Does anyone not see that Microsoft was laying a cuckoo's egg, to hatch and shove all of the Kerberos servers written and implemented by the original development team (or other commercial licensors) out of the nest?
Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant position in the industry means that it has the monopoly power to drive network effects to its benefit every time. Without licenses like the GPL, does anyone imagine there would be any substantial competition to Microsoft in the commodity platform arena? Why should anyone besides Microsoft disparage Open Source licensing that helps mitigate Microsoft's monopolizing tendencies?
Besides, you are ignoring the fact that the legal issues of GPL require the larger work to be open sourced...MS couldn't use a GPL library inside windows even if they wanted to because they place too much value on maintaining control over the codebase that they paid billions to write and maintain.
Two points. First, GPL'ed software runs on Windows all the time.. see Cygwin, Xemacs, etc. That doesn't lead to a requirement that Windows be licensed under the GPL, anymore than the fact that the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPL means that my copy of DB2 for Linux has to be licensed under the GPL.
Second, remember that people who want to create a standard library will often use the LGPL rather than the GPL. Again and again you'll see that people who are trying to create standard code for interoperability will choose to do it through LGPL or other non-GPL Open Source licenses, or will make provisions for dual licensing.
I did read the ruling and comments, actually. The penalty was vacated because Jackson had mouthed off when he shouldn't have, and because his rush to get to closure without holding penalty hearings didn't sit well with the appeals court. The fact that they vacated Penfield's ruling never meant that the district court judge that took over the case could not set the same penalty, if the DOJ could justify it on the remaining charges.
Bush's DOJ seems to have deliberately sought to get out of litigating against Microsoft, and so declared that based on the rejection of certain of the charges, they would not seek the breakup. That's not to say that the appeals court made that decision, because they didn't.
Of course, the real interesting matter now is what Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will do with the DOJ/MS sweetheart deal and the remaining states' now independent litigation. It's not at all clear that MS will simply get the existing DOJ settlement rubber-stamped.
The Appeals court did not refuse a break-up, they just overturned a fraction of the counts against Microsoft and kicked Penfield Jackson's ass off of the case for his injudicious blathering to the press.
The fact is, MS was convicted on a few counts, most importantly on being an illegally maintained monopoly, opening it up to potential civil liability. This is not nothing.
And any declaration of what MS has won is premature until Kotar-Kelley comes back with her decision in this phase of the proceedings.
If only The Underdogs would at least have the grace to link to games that were also published on other (better) platforms.. it's extremely silly to link to the PC's (CGA!) version of Marble Madness or Arctic Fox when extremely good versions came out for the Amiga, which are perfectly playable on Amiga emulators for the PC these days.
This goes for a great deal of the first half of their historical archives.. any cross platform game that came out before 1988 or so would inevitably have been far better played on the Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 800, Commodore 64, etc.
Well, if so, they'll do well by it. It seems unlikely that as many people would go out and buy a second copy of FoTR (for how much?) as would buy AoTC for the first time.
I, of course, will be so there, though.
Neither will the guy who set up this trojan, since it was caught and removed within 6 hours of being inserted.
In Ray Bradybury's Novel Fahrenheit 451, there was this interactive TV wall thing, where a character watched this soap opera, and every so often, the characters on screen would freeze, turn to the camera, and say in mechanical tones.. 'So, what do you think.. <Frank Smith>'?, waiting for the viewer to say something (anything), whereupon the show continued.. It was a critique of television, and Bradbury's prediction that a bit of fake interactivity could make people total zombies, without even enough free thought to ponder how much meaning or communication was really happening on TV.
So I wonder if that's where they got the name Fahrenheit from. Very ironic, if so.
Well, it's not clear that this state of affairs will continue indefinitely. I just put together a presentation using OpenOffice's Impress module, which is patterened after (and file-compatible with) PowerPoint, and had a pretty darn easy time with it. A whole lot of users could be quite happy and productive with an OpenOffice/Mozilla/KDE desktop, if it came down to it.
The thing is, though, that it would take a fairly large and well supported organization to make that sort of move. Your average consumer has made a decision to go out and pay a thousand dollars or so to be able to run all the cool software at their local Fry's. Paying 900 dollars to not be able to run any of that cool software doesn't make much economic sense for most people. In a well supported organization, though, the computers are to get the work done, and saving a couple hundred dollars times ten thousand employees starts to feel like noticeable cash.
OpenOffice is pretty nice, though.
Bought individually, comparable products would cost you an estimated $250:
Aren't Apple customers supposed to be smart enough to know the difference between a one-time purchase price (Backup certainly, Anti-virus possibly) and yearly expenses? And what Mac OS X viruses are we talking about here, anyway?
The other prices quoted might be reasonable if one were only paying one of those, but once you've got 100megs of online storage, the email storage and the home page creation and hosting would cost rather little, I would think.
Seems like Steve is conducting an experiment to see how much Apple users really, really love him. "If you really loved me, you'd pay $100 dollars a year for a @mac.com address."