I've seen a number of mysterious X freezes in XFree86 4.1.0 and earlier on my Athlon/GeForce2MX system with NVidia kernel/X drivers. Most often the X server just seems to lock up when I'm doing nothing in particular. Occasionally I've had the whole system freeze during 3d gaming.
This is all with Linux 2.2.18. Has anyone commented for sure on this bug in the 2.2 series?
Well, this could help kill two birds with one stone for AOL/Time Warner. Concerned about a popular Linux distribution out there that doesn't have all the latest in DRM controls for content for all of Time Warner's recording and movie properties?
Ick. I don't know.. if AOL/Time Warner does buy Red Hat, they're going to have one heck of a case of multiple personality disorder to sort out.
I'm assuming that 40 bits is vulnerable because you are able to quickly test each permutation against a file to see if it looks like you've found the key. If the files were compressed, then unless you knew the compression algorithm and could try it out against an entire file, your test speed would drop dramatically, no?
Not that that would help Mr. Shoebomber, as he was using an encrypted filesystem where there are bound to be lots and lots of clues as to whether you've got the right key (i.e., the filesystem makes sense, has valid pointers, etc.).
Their browser team has gone all native on them, then. As long as the Mozilla browser is open source and free for anyone to take and adopt, it doesn't matter diddly/squat what AOL tries to enforce in the Netscape browser suite.
AOL is another matter, and they certainly do have a tighter rein on things in their walled garden, but they have done nothing to prevent the rest of us from living happily on the outside yet.
Have you tried the StarOffice 6 beta? The Writer module seems pretty intuitive to me, with the exception of their Outline numbering mode. Home, End, Cut, Paste.. pretty Word-like. It's true that some imported Word files have a lot of (synthesized, I assume) styles defined with mysterious names, but to the extent that Microsoft refuses to document their file formats, ease of use and Word compatibility may have to be in some tension.
Regarding emacs.. I'd say that it is actually extremely easy to use for what it is intended for. Let's not confuse 'easy to use' with 'easy to learn'. If you make something easy to learn, you have only covered the first small fraction of the user's experience. I would personally love to have keystrokes that would let me fly through a Word document the way that Emacs will. I'd love to be able to hit a keystroke to convert a word to capital or uppercase, or to center the display on the line that I am editing, but I won't find those in Word. Word is a good text formatting tool, but it's never been a particularly easy to use text editing tool. Too much mousing for too little control.
Well, I'll post a pointer to Ganymede,
which is not specifically for LDAP, but which could probably be useful in a lot of environments.
Ganymede is at once simpler than LDAP, in that it doesn't support the kind of hierarchical objects that LDAP and x.500 support, and in that it doesn't actually speak LDAP, and more complex, in that it has a sophisticated transactions model and can handle complex concurrent operations while maintaining namespace and referential integrity.
Ganymede is useful if you want to have a smallish (less than 50,000 users, say) 'flat' directory, but for which you want to allow detailed permisison delegation and fine-grained concurrency. If you have a very large NIS domain and you want to allow scores of users and admins to be changing their passwords and account information concurrently, Ganymede will work wonders for you.
We actually use Ganymede for just about everything here, up to and including our DNS, although we don't have our DNS support code 'productized' yet. We do master our LDAP directory from Ganymede data, in order to support applications which can use an LDAP server for an address book (such as Outlook and Netscape Messenger). If you were to combine Ganymede with something like Thomas Reith's ldapdiff utility, you could combine Ganymede's sophisticated administration services with LDAP for distribution.
According to Tumbleweed's press release, the patent in question concerns "Private URLs for Directed Document Delivery", which sounds pretty damn elementary. It's not like no one could have possibly come up with the idea of private, dynamically generated URL's for document retrieval. In fact, given the way that the use of URL's is, well, intrinsic to the way the web works, who wouldn't do this if it was unsatisfactory to send the whole shmear over email, as is obviously the case if the html content you want to send involves custom rendered gif's and the like.
Now, OSX has the advantage of a pretty decent Mach/BSD core, and an incredibly impressive and functional GUI.
Mac OS X's Quartz layer is very nice, but in following Steve Job's quest for a unique visual "hook" for X, Apple has rendered the system far less usable/functional than either KDE or Windows. Window transparency is a cool trick and it's wonderful that the graphics engine can do it, but the processor cost for actually turning it on is astronomical. The dock has been widely criticized as being tuned to make a cool demo more than to actually be useful.
Mac OS 9 and before had a really functional GUI. Mac OS X is still a bastardized system that's optimized to look cool on TV more than it is to use.
For my money, the only real advantages that Mac OS X has over Linux are 1) commercial polish, in that all adjustments can be gotten at through the GUI, and all Mac OS X systems will do it the same way, 2) the ability to run your old copies of Dark Castle and SuperPaint, and 3) Quicktime.
For commercial polish, check out Mandrake or the latest Red Hat. They still show more UNIX than OS X does, but they are getting better and better. 2 isn't a factor for me, and as for 3, well, I wouldn't care to run a given OS just because Apple is trying to hold online content hostage to their choice of platforms.
Actually, this patent is a detailed road map explaining exactly how control over our computers will be taken away from us. It has some nicely done points, including the need for a secure time source, but I imagine that the secure time source point is not novel to this patent.
The system as a whole seems fairly obviously to be what you need to do if you want to have a secure DRM system, and I imagine that anyone with 'Skill in the art' would come around to this same basic layout if they applied themselves to it, but Microsoft got the patent first. Will make it quite hard for anyone else who wants to host media on their systems (including Linux/BSD users), but credit to them for getting this in to the PTO. Any OS vendor could have patented this, and it wouldn't have taken a lot of foresight to see the necessity for this sort of thing. Microsoft was on the ball more than the others, that's all.
Of course, there's the whole problem about getting the horse to drink, but that's for a later day.
One of my biggest reasons for working on open source projects is that the software world is driven by network effects. If my employer had decided to go with ActiveDirectory for everything instead of developing Ganymede (if ActiveDirectory had even existed when we needed a solution), we would have tied ourselves to the wheel of Microsoft fees and upgrades, in perpetuity, forever. I personally didn't want to see that happen, for ego reasons and for the sake of my l33t UNIX job skills. My employer didn't want to see that happen, because it might have given far too much power to Microsoft over our operations. No sense being too dependent on any one vendor when you can do something about it.
It's the exact same reason why AOL is supporting the Mozilla project.. if AOL had to depend on Microsoft's good will to provide Internet services to its customers, it might at any time have its customers taken away from it, assuming a compliant DOJ.
So, yes, there's economic rationality there, there's also cultural issues, there's also ego, and pride of work, all of it.
I agree with Linus.. projects that I've spent several years on came out at the end with features and design elements I could never have predicted going in. I've spent 6 months doing design work on pen and paper at the start of a project, and during the years of implementation thereafter, far more 'design' was done by reacting to the state of the code in any given moment and the problems it was having both internally and with regard to the userbase. My biggest project has evolved tremendously, even though I was essentially the only coder working on it for most of its existence. I can't imagine, then, how much less 'designed' by any individual the linux kernel must be, with the hundreds or thousands of developers contributing to it.
On the topic of Sun's doom, I understand why he says that. Sun's software is co-evolved with their hardware, but neither change very quickly. Linux has to cope with a much more wild, much more genetically diverse hardware base, and as a result it tends to move faster to support new types of devices. Solaris on Intel is a joke compare with Linux on Intel in terms of its hardware support.
Of course, there is nothing magical about a process that allows more evolutionary freedom.. if the hackers working on it don't have the good sense to be effective natural selectors and mutators, then the process won't have a terrific outcome. Linux is thriving because it has so darn many hackers working on it, and because it has so very, very many users using it, and because Linus has a deep and proper understanding of both good taste and evolution.
The EFF was pursuing an iffy course of legal action by attempting to sue the RIAA for something the RIAA had already relented on, anyway. Just because this case was dismissed at the district court level doesn't mean that the DMCA has been ruled constitutional.
Just relax, and for god's sake don't go harassing a sitting federal judge. It won't do one damn bit of good, and it'll give the EFF a bad name. Just write your congress people.. they're the ones that are supposed to respond to democratic complaint.
Guess what this game seems to be worth boys and girls.
Well, it sounds like it's worth about $5 to you. Which means you may just not get to have a copy, I guess.
For me, I'd be willing to pay $30-$35 for it, as the original Open Source Tux Racer was a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm willing to pay up for the man-years of effort that have gone into the game since then.
In any case, Economics 101 says that the best way to price things in a free market is to find the optimum price, where the most money will be earned.. if someone out there was willing to pay one million dollars for their copy, then that's what SunSpire should charge.. million bucks free and clear, and if a second person ever wanted to buy it, then that's gravy..
In the real world, they'll probably price it somewhere in the 20-40 buck range, depending on how good they think the game is and how well they can market it. They'll hopefully get a good bunch of sales, then if their sales start to drop off, they'll put it on sale and maybe someday it'll be at a price even you, personally, can afford.
Open Source is well and good (I've spent the last 6 years working on a GPL'ed project), but Linux needs commercial software development to be successful.. it's okay if you have only a handful of Open Source databases, or only a couple of complete Open Source web servers, but if you want to get a consumer mass market, you need hundreds and thousands of games, and there's only so many people with the talent, desire, and disposable resources to produce open source games.
Context switches are slow. On some architectures, pathologically so.
But what's the alternative? Things like DGA work fine for programs that need direct video mapping, but in a multi-user system you can't really have arbitrary (i.e., non-root) user programs mucking around with the video display directly. You'd have to either do like Berlin or Display Postscript/Quartz do and push more complex rendering requests to the graphics server (which could be done through X11 extensions), or you have to drastically complicate the kernel, undermining overall system stability.
But it STILL does happen - I've had it happen to me personally (cheap S3 chipsets) and I've seen it happen to others.
I've never had it happen.. my X display locks up with distressing frequency (about once per week), but I can always ssh into my box and kill of the X display to get things unstuck.
Which performance hit is that? The performance hit where each process doesn't get to draw directly on the screen without any multiuser permissions checking? The performance hit where programs have to use a strictly defined API? The performance hit where the kernel isn't handling the GUI, so that video driver problems don't lock the whole system?
The only performance hit I've ever seen in X is from either a) using X over a network, or b) from the user-level context switch required to execute the API requests. a) is inevitable if you want that feature, and b) is inevitable if you want a stable system that enforces permissions.
How about Avalon Hill's Civilization board game, that Sid Meier drew on when making the original Civ?
Or the many empire type games that came out on various computer platforms before Civ? Civilization only came out in 1991,
after all.. there were lots of games on the TRS-80 a decade earlier that had similar themes.. remember Santa Paravia & Fiumaccio? Or Populous? Or Seven Cities of Gold?
I remember a multi-user AppleTalk networked Conquest game that involved the exploration and conquest of a large world that was blacked out until you explored it, back in the mid-to-late 80's.. Conquest or some such thing.
Sid Meier's Civilization was a great, innovative game, but that doesn't mean there were no predecessors that were drawn from.
Have you actually had to manage a system that works like this? It's a royal pain in the ass.
Yup, I have. In fact, we've managed all of our UNIX systems that way for the last 8 years or so. It's not a pain in the ass at all.. in fact, with the opt_depot scripts we wrote, we support automagic NFS sharing of packages for all Solaris systems in our laboratory. Indidivual system administrators can choose to use a particular package off of their choice of NFS servers, or they can simply copy the package's directory to their local system.
Using symlinks gives you complete location independence.. all you need is a symlink from your PATH directory to the binaries, and a symlink from the canonical package location (e.g.,/opt/depot/xemacs-21.5) to the actual location of the package directory, be it local or be it NFS.
There's a group at NLM who is working on tools and standard practices for managing NFS package archives using RPM, and then using the opt_depot scripts to integrate the package archives with each local system automatically.
There have actually been many, many implementations of this basic idea, each with their own frills and features. I have a comprehensive listing of these programs on our opt_depot page.
Take a look, if you're interested in that sort
of thing.. I can think of relatively few ideas that have been implemented and re-implemented so many times.
Many years ago, we wrote a set of Perl utilities for automating symlink maintenance called opt_depot.
It's similar to the original CMU Depot program,
but has built in support for linking to a set of
NFS package volumes, and can cleanly interoperate
with non-depot-managed files in the same file tree.
Already done: Highlight the URL you want in some other application and then middle-click in a blank spot on any Mozilla page. You can even set this up to open a new tab with the tabbed browser by going to the new tab preferences under 'Navigator'.
Not knowing how to do that has been my number one complaint about Mozilla lately. Thanks!
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a number of mysterious X freezes in XFree86 4.1.0 and earlier on my Athlon/GeForce2MX system with NVidia kernel/X drivers. Most often the X server just seems to lock up when I'm doing nothing in particular. Occasionally I've had the whole system freeze during 3d gaming.
This is all with Linux 2.2.18. Has anyone commented for sure on this bug in the 2.2 series?
Well, this could help kill two birds with one stone for AOL/Time Warner. Concerned about a popular Linux distribution out there that doesn't have all the latest in DRM controls for content for all of Time Warner's recording and movie properties?
Ick. I don't know.. if AOL/Time Warner does buy Red Hat, they're going to have one heck of a case of multiple personality disorder to sort out.
I'm assuming that 40 bits is vulnerable because you are able to quickly test each permutation against a file to see if it looks like you've found the key. If the files were compressed, then unless you knew the compression algorithm and could try it out against an entire file, your test speed would drop dramatically, no?
Not that that would help Mr. Shoebomber, as he was using an encrypted filesystem where there are bound to be lots and lots of clues as to whether you've got the right key (i.e., the filesystem makes sense, has valid pointers, etc.).
Surely this can be some small factor, at least?
Their browser team has gone all native on them, then. As long as the Mozilla browser is open source and free for anyone to take and adopt, it doesn't matter diddly/squat what AOL tries to enforce in the Netscape browser suite.
AOL is another matter, and they certainly do have a tighter rein on things in their walled garden, but they have done nothing to prevent the rest of us from living happily on the outside yet.
Have you tried the StarOffice 6 beta? The Writer module seems pretty intuitive to me, with the exception of their Outline numbering mode. Home, End, Cut, Paste.. pretty Word-like. It's true that some imported Word files have a lot of (synthesized, I assume) styles defined with mysterious names, but to the extent that Microsoft refuses to document their file formats, ease of use and Word compatibility may have to be in some tension.
Regarding emacs.. I'd say that it is actually extremely easy to use for what it is intended for. Let's not confuse 'easy to use' with 'easy to learn'. If you make something easy to learn, you have only covered the first small fraction of the user's experience. I would personally love to have keystrokes that would let me fly through a Word document the way that Emacs will. I'd love to be able to hit a keystroke to convert a word to capital or uppercase, or to center the display on the line that I am editing, but I won't find those in Word. Word is a good text formatting tool, but it's never been a particularly easy to use text editing tool. Too much mousing for too little control.
Tsk. StarOffice/OpenOffice Writer looks nothing like Emacs or Vi. Let's not be so quick to generalize.
Well, I'll post a pointer to Ganymede, which is not specifically for LDAP, but which could probably be useful in a lot of environments.
Ganymede is at once simpler than LDAP, in that it doesn't support the kind of hierarchical objects that LDAP and x.500 support, and in that it doesn't actually speak LDAP, and more complex, in that it has a sophisticated transactions model and can handle complex concurrent operations while maintaining namespace and referential integrity.
Ganymede is useful if you want to have a smallish (less than 50,000 users, say) 'flat' directory, but for which you want to allow detailed permisison delegation and fine-grained concurrency. If you have a very large NIS domain and you want to allow scores of users and admins to be changing their passwords and account information concurrently, Ganymede will work wonders for you.
We actually use Ganymede for just about everything here, up to and including our DNS, although we don't have our DNS support code 'productized' yet. We do master our LDAP directory from Ganymede data, in order to support applications which can use an LDAP server for an address book (such as Outlook and Netscape Messenger). If you were to combine Ganymede with something like Thomas Reith's ldapdiff utility, you could combine Ganymede's sophisticated administration services with LDAP for distribution.
According to Tumbleweed's press release, the patent in question concerns "Private URLs for Directed Document Delivery", which sounds pretty damn elementary. It's not like no one could have possibly come up with the idea of private, dynamically generated URL's for document retrieval. In fact, given the way that the use of URL's is, well, intrinsic to the way the web works, who wouldn't do this if it was unsatisfactory to send the whole shmear over email, as is obviously the case if the html content you want to send involves custom rendered gif's and the like.
Now, OSX has the advantage of a pretty decent Mach/BSD core, and an incredibly impressive and functional GUI.
Mac OS X's Quartz layer is very nice, but in following Steve Job's quest for a unique visual "hook" for X, Apple has rendered the system far less usable/functional than either KDE or Windows. Window transparency is a cool trick and it's wonderful that the graphics engine can do it, but the processor cost for actually turning it on is astronomical. The dock has been widely criticized as being tuned to make a cool demo more than to actually be useful.
Mac OS 9 and before had a really functional GUI. Mac OS X is still a bastardized system that's optimized to look cool on TV more than it is to use.
For my money, the only real advantages that Mac OS X has over Linux are 1) commercial polish, in that all adjustments can be gotten at through the GUI, and all Mac OS X systems will do it the same way, 2) the ability to run your old copies of Dark Castle and SuperPaint, and 3) Quicktime.
For commercial polish, check out Mandrake or the latest Red Hat. They still show more UNIX than OS X does, but they are getting better and better. 2 isn't a factor for me, and as for 3, well, I wouldn't care to run a given OS just because Apple is trying to hold online content hostage to their choice of platforms.
Actually, this patent is a detailed road map explaining exactly how control over our computers will be taken away from us. It has some nicely done points, including the need for a secure time source, but I imagine that the secure time source point is not novel to this patent.
The system as a whole seems fairly obviously to be what you need to do if you want to have a secure DRM system, and I imagine that anyone with 'Skill in the art' would come around to this same basic layout if they applied themselves to it, but Microsoft got the patent first. Will make it quite hard for anyone else who wants to host media on their systems (including Linux/BSD users), but credit to them for getting this in to the PTO. Any OS vendor could have patented this, and it wouldn't have taken a lot of foresight to see the necessity for this sort of thing. Microsoft was on the ball more than the others, that's all.
Of course, there's the whole problem about getting the horse to drink, but that's for a later day.
One of my biggest reasons for working on open source projects is that the software world is driven by network effects. If my employer had decided to go with ActiveDirectory for everything instead of developing Ganymede (if ActiveDirectory had even existed when we needed a solution), we would have tied ourselves to the wheel of Microsoft fees and upgrades, in perpetuity, forever. I personally didn't want to see that happen, for ego reasons and for the sake of my l33t UNIX job skills. My employer didn't want to see that happen, because it might have given far too much power to Microsoft over our operations. No sense being too dependent on any one vendor when you can do something about it.
It's the exact same reason why AOL is supporting the Mozilla project.. if AOL had to depend on Microsoft's good will to provide Internet services to its customers, it might at any time have its customers taken away from it, assuming a compliant DOJ.
So, yes, there's economic rationality there, there's also cultural issues, there's also ego, and pride of work, all of it.
I agree with Linus.. projects that I've spent several years on came out at the end with features and design elements I could never have predicted going in. I've spent 6 months doing design work on pen and paper at the start of a project, and during the years of implementation thereafter, far more 'design' was done by reacting to the state of the code in any given moment and the problems it was having both internally and with regard to the userbase. My biggest project has evolved tremendously, even though I was essentially the only coder working on it for most of its existence. I can't imagine, then, how much less 'designed' by any individual the linux kernel must be, with the hundreds or thousands of developers contributing to it.
On the topic of Sun's doom, I understand why he says that. Sun's software is co-evolved with their hardware, but neither change very quickly. Linux has to cope with a much more wild, much more genetically diverse hardware base, and as a result it tends to move faster to support new types of devices. Solaris on Intel is a joke compare with Linux on Intel in terms of its hardware support.
Of course, there is nothing magical about a process that allows more evolutionary freedom.. if the hackers working on it don't have the good sense to be effective natural selectors and mutators, then the process won't have a terrific outcome. Linux is thriving because it has so darn many hackers working on it, and because it has so very, very many users using it, and because Linus has a deep and proper understanding of both good taste and evolution.
The high-res CLIE models (both monochrome and color) actually run at 4 times the resolution.. 2x in both dimensions.
The EFF was pursuing an iffy course of legal action by attempting to sue the RIAA for something the RIAA had already relented on, anyway. Just because this case was dismissed at the district court level doesn't mean that the DMCA has been ruled constitutional.
Just relax, and for god's sake don't go harassing a sitting federal judge. It won't do one damn bit of good, and it'll give the EFF a bad name. Just write your congress people.. they're the ones that are supposed to respond to democratic complaint.
Guess what this game seems to be worth boys and girls.
Well, it sounds like it's worth about $5 to you. Which means you may just not get to have a copy, I guess.
For me, I'd be willing to pay $30-$35 for it, as the original Open Source Tux Racer was a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm willing to pay up for the man-years of effort that have gone into the game since then.
In any case, Economics 101 says that the best way to price things in a free market is to find the optimum price, where the most money will be earned.. if someone out there was willing to pay one million dollars for their copy, then that's what SunSpire should charge.. million bucks free and clear, and if a second person ever wanted to buy it, then that's gravy..
In the real world, they'll probably price it somewhere in the 20-40 buck range, depending on how good they think the game is and how well they can market it. They'll hopefully get a good bunch of sales, then if their sales start to drop off, they'll put it on sale and maybe someday it'll be at a price even you, personally, can afford.
Open Source is well and good (I've spent the last 6 years working on a GPL'ed project), but Linux needs commercial software development to be successful.. it's okay if you have only a handful of Open Source databases, or only a couple of complete Open Source web servers, but if you want to get a consumer mass market, you need hundreds and thousands of games, and there's only so many people with the talent, desire, and disposable resources to produce open source games.
Context switches are slow. On some architectures, pathologically so.
But what's the alternative? Things like DGA work fine for programs that need direct video mapping, but in a multi-user system you can't really have arbitrary (i.e., non-root) user programs mucking around with the video display directly. You'd have to either do like Berlin or Display Postscript/Quartz do and push more complex rendering requests to the graphics server (which could be done through X11 extensions), or you have to drastically complicate the kernel, undermining overall system stability.
But it STILL does happen - I've had it happen to me personally (cheap S3 chipsets) and I've seen it happen to others.
I've never had it happen.. my X display locks up with distressing frequency (about once per week), but I can always ssh into my box and kill of the X display to get things unstuck.
Which performance hit is that? The performance hit where each process doesn't get to draw directly on the screen without any multiuser permissions checking? The performance hit where programs have to use a strictly defined API? The performance hit where the kernel isn't handling the GUI, so that video driver problems don't lock the whole system?
The only performance hit I've ever seen in X is from either a) using X over a network, or b) from the user-level context switch required to execute the API requests. a) is inevitable if you want that feature, and b) is inevitable if you want a stable system that enforces permissions.
How about Avalon Hill's Civilization board game, that Sid Meier drew on when making the original Civ?
Or the many empire type games that came out on various computer platforms before Civ? Civilization only came out in 1991, after all.. there were lots of games on the TRS-80 a decade earlier that had similar themes.. remember Santa Paravia & Fiumaccio? Or Populous? Or Seven Cities of Gold?
I remember a multi-user AppleTalk networked Conquest game that involved the exploration and conquest of a large world that was blacked out until you explored it, back in the mid-to-late 80's.. Conquest or some such thing.
Sid Meier's Civilization was a great, innovative game, but that doesn't mean there were no predecessors that were drawn from.
By all means, write your congresspeople, but for god's sake send a check in to the EFF already, willya?
Talking about this stuff on slashdot is useless if that's as far as it goes. Scream and shout, get involved, etc., etc., etc.
Please?
Ahhhh, right! That's what's been driving me crazy.
Now that I think of it, I really wish they would just support middle-clicking in the address widget, or enable the 'paste' menu option like IE does.
Have you actually had to manage a system that works like this? It's a royal pain in the ass.
Yup, I have. In fact, we've managed all of our UNIX systems that way for the last 8 years or so. It's not a pain in the ass at all.. in fact, with the opt_depot scripts we wrote, we support automagic NFS sharing of packages for all Solaris systems in our laboratory. Indidivual system administrators can choose to use a particular package off of their choice of NFS servers, or they can simply copy the package's directory to their local system.
Using symlinks gives you complete location independence.. all you need is a symlink from your PATH directory to the binaries, and a symlink from the canonical package location (e.g., /opt/depot/xemacs-21.5) to the actual location of the package directory, be it local or be it NFS.
There's a group at NLM who is working on tools and standard practices for managing NFS package archives using RPM, and then using the opt_depot scripts to integrate the package archives with each local system automatically.
There have actually been many, many implementations of this basic idea, each with their own frills and features. I have a comprehensive listing of these programs on our opt_depot page.
Take a look, if you're interested in that sort of thing.. I can think of relatively few ideas that have been implemented and re-implemented so many times.
Many years ago, we wrote a set of Perl utilities for automating symlink maintenance called opt_depot.
It's similar to the original CMU Depot program, but has built in support for linking to a set of NFS package volumes, and can cleanly interoperate with non-depot-managed files in the same file tree.
Already done: Highlight the URL you want in some other application and then middle-click in a blank spot on any Mozilla page. You can even set this up to open a new tab with the tabbed browser by going to the new tab preferences under 'Navigator'.
Not knowing how to do that has been my number one complaint about Mozilla lately. Thanks!
It is lot for a such a quality piece of software.
You mispelled kwality, I think.