Re:So if the this is completely free of charge...
on
1-800-Google Launches
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· Score: 1
Just to pick nits, Overture is still very much in the game. They're still generating a few billion dollars a year for the company that acquired them, Yahoo. It's certainly fair to say that Google is pulling ahead in that race, but nobody's been killed yet.
1) Use well-written, flexible html to suggest general formatting. Do not attempt pixel-precise layout.
2) Do not rely on ecmascript, flash, css, or any other superfluous nonsense. If you do choose to add such boondoggles to your site, make sure that things function properly without them.
3) Keep in mind that not all clients will display all attributes in the same way. "Strong" may not always mean bold, meanginful alt tags should be used for clients that don't display images, and so on.
You may notice that these are the same steps that are required for creating any civilized website. If you've done things right in the first place, you should not need to know or care whether your clients are 30" displays, text readers, cellphones, search engines, or whatever new context will be popular next year.
I'll admit that I've only looked through the macosx vulnerability section in any detail, but I'm certainly not experiencing anything like the cringing promised by the writeup.
The upshot seemed to be that even when the examiner intentionally turned on every service and did not enable the firewall, the only vulnerabilities found were two timing-based user-enumeration attacks.
That's... that's the big shocking secret? That if I go out of my way to ask my system to be considerably less secure than its default configuration, Mallory out there can find out the names of accounts on my system? Quick, somebody get me some smelling salts!
What is it you mean by Apple not "getting" security? Their security track record has been fairly good for at least the last decade or so, and in the only trait you describe in your post (crediting the reporters of security bugs), they do exactly the same thing as the other organizations you praise.
Most reasonable companies do, in fact, give credit to the reporters of security bugs.
In fact, Apple themselves do give such credit when it's due. But in this particular case, it doesn't appear that the bugs Apple fixed were reported by Ou and Ellch, so crediting them was not appropriate.
So, exactly how many 9/11 type attacks does it take for terrorism to go from trivial to significant?
If we had one every month, it'd rise to the level of severity of traffic accidents.
If we had one every week, it'd rise to the level of severity of influenza.
If we had one every four years, it would rise to the level of severity of deaths caused by falling out of bed.
If we say that there's been one WTC-scale terrorist attack in the last fifty years (to circumvent a discussion about whether Pearl Harbor counts), then the closest cause of national mortality I can find is "contact with hornets, wasps and bees".
I don't live my life in fear of bees. I don't find it acceptable for the government to suspend habeas corpus to fight the dire threat of bees. I certainly don't find it acceptable for the government to spend half a trillion dollars on killing several hundred thousand innocent people in order to protect me from bees.
Why is it that there seems to be two responses from these anti-Bush/anti-patriot act groups? "Terror laws don't work" where as the last full scale terror attack on our country was 5 years ago. The second response is usually "Well the world hates us" and you look again and there hasn't been an attack on US soil since 9/11. So why hasn't terrorism reigned supreme here if everyone hates us and Homeland security isn't working? We aren't fighting the three stogies here.
Oh, that's an easy one. Those two positions are not contradictory at all.
Invasive, authoritarian laws like the PATRIOT Act do greatly increase the risk of terrorism (in addition to having many more deleterious effects). But terrorism is a trivial problem in the first place: something that happens with negligible frequency, and harms (on a national scale) a miniscule number of people.
So, yes, the Bush administration is actively working to destroy the Bill of Rights in order to make a trivial problem slightly worse. I do have kind of a problem with that.
You must be daft or something. I have been saying they are different because one is voluntary by deciding to take an action. The others are involuntary because all you need to do is be alive and in somewhat of a close proximiy to catch. That is the only reasons the governemt should be able to inject into your otherwise personal life....
I never said that, i said you need to make a decision to have sex and thatr decision removes the government responsibility to interact with you.
As several other people have pointed out to you, going out in public and being exposed to measles is also a volitional choice. You could instead elect you spend your life as a recluse, or wear a CDC bunnysuit your entire life. Of course it's not reasonable to expect most people to choose to do that. Any more than it's reasonable to expect most people to choose to not have sex.
They are both volitional choices, so by your standards the government should have no say in either of them. But you seem to be overlooking the fact that they are both choices that affect the health of your fellow citizens, and thus the government may have a valid reason to be involved.
This is because you are insanly stupid.
If you really are interested in convincing people of the merits of your views, allow me to suggest that a clearly reasoned argument will take you considerably further than infantile name-calling.
You can see the differences I am talking about and know how insane it is to force this onto people but either have an altier goal for this or actualy support the government having this kind of control over people.
How charming of you to tell me what I can see and what I know.
I invite you to take a look at my posting history; you'll probably note that I have a strong bent toward being suspicious of governments, and have regularly described the importance of personal liberty and privacy. I am most definitely not in favor of a more authoritarian government, but I think public health is a realm in which governmental involvement can sometimes be beneficial.
But the three headed baby stuff isn't evidence-free bogeyman stories.
It isn't? Then by all means, please present your evidence for "grandchildren missing legs or arms or mentaly retarded because of something done by this vaccine". You have, at the most, pointed out that the vaccine has been around for less than a few decades, so there's some possibility that there are effects that current testing has not yet revealed. Isn't that true of most medicines? Are you suggesting that we should canary all new drugs and therapies for two or three human generations before we ever use them?
[You describing Merck doing bad things related to Vioxx.]
Yeah, I have a person-who-reads-the-news level of familiarity with it. It sounds pretty likely that they behaved unethically. So, what, you're on a crusade against every other product Merck ever makes? If every detail about this story were the same except the company that makes the drug, you'd have a different position on it?
You're the one saying that you're in favor of standard vaccinations for polio, smallpox, and measles, yet opposed to standard vaccinations for HPV. And you keep repeating over and over that they're completely categorically different, without actually presenting an argument as to how they're different and why they should be treated differently.
Combined with your assertions that having sex is outside the realm of leading one's normal life, I can't see any conclusion other than you having some hang-up about sex that you're trying to visit on the rest of the world. If, as you say, there's some other reason, feel free to present that argument any day now.
I'm kind of amazed that people are reacting to the $400 figure as if it were expensive. I honestly thought the whole point of mentioning it in stories is to point out that this treatment is so incredibly cheap as to border on free.
A $400 vaccination once, or a substantial risk of either experiencing or contributing to someone else's million dollars in cancer treatment, over the course of years of misery and possible fatality. How does this seem like even the most trivially difficult choice?
Unless you're saying that your kids are two years old, allow me to remind you that parents have a millennia-old tendency to vastly overestimate the age at which their children will become sexually active.
The risk of vaccinating too late dwarfs the risk of vaccinating too early.
Even if gardasil is completly safe, it doesn't effect the welbeing of anyone who doesn't make a choice outside living their daily lives.
This seems to be the whole crux of your argument. And unfortunately, it's just flawed.
You seem to be grouping things into "normal" activities like going out in public and "abnormal" activities like having sex. This distinction is arbitrary and meaningless. Having sex is not, as you say, "outside living their daily lives." It is a perfectly normal and reasonable part of living one's daily life.
I'm sorry that you're concerned about your experience with Vioxx. But turning your back on the entirety of medicine because the possibility of side effects exists does not seem like a sane and reasonable response. And condemning hundreds of thousands more women to cervical cancer with your completely evidence-free bogeyman stories of three-headed babies is most certainly not.
Well, that's true in the case of casually-communicated diseases, which jump from host to host indiscriminately.
But HPV basically requires sexual contact in order to be transmitted. Vaccinating all women would isolate the disease to a few populations among gay men (for whom the virus is much less risky) and transmission from bisexual men to women (which would be relatively rare).
I'm not saying that men shouldn't be vaccinated as well, just that it might be jumping the gun a bit to suggest that Merck was intentionally trying to preserve the disease in order to maintain profits.
I've only worked for two of the three (Yahoo to Google), but as far as I've seen _nobody_ wants you to disclose the inner workings of the others to them. This true on at least three levels that come to mind:
- The competitive advantage of knowing about other companies' proprietary information is dwarfed by the liability of acquiring that information. Especially given that you'd be acquiring them through someone who had proven they could not be trusted to keep a secret.
- At least Google has the (mostly deserved) hubris to assume that their own solutions to problems will tend to be as good as or better than other companies' solutions. So while other solutions may be academically interesting, they generally won't be useful.
- Lastly and most significantly, it's unethical. And yes, every person with whom I've worked at either company would find this alone to be reason enough to refrain, even if it did grant a competitive advantage.
Really, everyone would rather just hire competent, trustworthy people who will do their actual job well and with appropriate discretion. No one is looking for a stool pigeon.
I can give you a version of one of the two: powerbooks from the last couple of years have had multi-touch trackpads. And among the things they do with that is acting as a secondary button. A tap with one finger is a primary click, a tap with two fingers is a secondary click. I find it pretty smooth to use, far more so than using the control key.
And I know I can't dictate your preferences to you, but I still just don't understand the obsession with wanting a maximize button. A maximize button struck me as silly back when we were using 9" displays, and it has only gotten sillier since.
I think you're wrong about your "almost everybody" assessment. I know you're wrong about the rest.
Cheaper: Given how many machines have been coming with wireless ethernet standard for about seven years now, there's no significant cost difference. Half the time wired ethernet would cost (trivially) more, just because you need to buy switches and cables for machines that you could instead just tell to talk to one another over hardware they already have.
More reliable: A few people will have range issues or interference issues. Not only is that uncommon, it's something that's pretty much clear at the outset, not generally a problem that will crop up unexpectedly later on. Like, say, a cheap switch or cable going bad. Again, a wash at best.
More secure: Nope. Every packet you send out over the internet is going to pass through many networks out of your control. If you want it private, you'd better encrypt it before it ever leaves your machine. Securing one of the thirty hops between you and your destination buys you nothing.
Faster: I have a 6Mbit/s dsl connection. A few lucky people in my city have 30Mbit/s fiber connections. When residential internet connectivity starts exceeding the speed of residential wireless connectivity, you can talk about faster. Until then, it's not the bottleneck, so it doesn't matter how fast it is.
Now, let's get to the far more important issues that you happened to fail to mention. Wired ethernet requires far more technical expertise of its users. And even for users with entirely sufficient expertise, it's a pain in the ass.
I have three options: I can spend an unpleasant afternoon crawling around under my house doing a good job of wiring it; I can spend an hour inside doing a crappy job of wiring it, with cables running over doorways (and need to re-do it if I ever decide to so much as move a desk); or I can spend four seconds just telling my computers to use the tools they already have to just sort this crap out for me, and never have to think about it again.
Part of the deal with the big four music publishers (and probably movie and television publishers) is that all content sold through the online store gets the same protection scheme. So they couldn't actually sell Disney content sans drm without abrogating their deals with their other content providers.
Oh, and he's the plurality stockholder, but very, very far from being a majority. He is leagues away from being able to make such decisions unilaterally for Disney.
Did you, by any chance, read the actual article? It discusses exactly the ideas you suggest, and presents a reasonable case for why those would not allow them to keep their obligations to the music publishers.
I most definitely am saying that sites should not rely on CSS. I frankly don't care whether sites include CSS, as long as they continue to do the right thing when my browser ignores it.
"Expanding the way people can present things on the internet" is not universally good; whether it's good or bad depends on the particular situation being discussed. Would you be in favor of site publishers replacing all their html with pdfs? Or with Word documents? Or perhaps just with big images of entire pages as they want them to look?
w3m is my browser of choice; I'm posting this using it right now. And I'm afraid that your assessment of the new slashdot's compatibility with it is rather generous.
Slash seems to spit out all of the nav garbage first, then the actual content afterward, and rely on css to rearrange them usefully. Which means that for every single slashdot page I load, I need to scan down through 5-10 pages of noise before I get to any actual content.
While that might make it at least barely possible to use the site, it makes it rather unpleasant. Which is why I've gone from a paying subscriber to an extremely occasional reader.
On the first two counts, netscape 3 had exactly the same script- and flash-blocking technology that I use to this day: not installing Flash and disabling javascript. (Or just using a browser that supports neither one in the first place.) Problem solved.
AdBlock.
I will agree that ad-blocking tools are the one and only front on which browsers have advanced somewhat in the past decade. Though I will suggest that gecko/netscape/firefox's solutions for this are rather lackluster, and have always trailed other tools by years.
Tabs are kickass.
Tabs, actually, are an atrocious interface tool; their only function is to make windows exclusive to one another, and remove your ability to access them simultaneously. Moreover, even if tabs really were "kickass", they're such a fundamental shift in the windowing paradigm that they would be appropriate only if provided by the windowing system, not by any single application. Something as basic as windows needs to be global across the entire platform, not a hell of individual application behaviours.
Methinks that if Netscape 3 had all the features you want, you don't want much. At least not the things I need.
You're right, "not much" is precisely what I want. I want a browser that can retrieve and render straight html. If I'm feeling really fancy, I might want it to support inline images. I most definitely do not want an application suite, a plugin framework, a sandboxed runtime environment, or hosting of turing-complete programming language. I want a sodding web browser.
1) I didn't assert that netscape 4 used gecko. I asserted that gecko was a slight improvement over netscape 4, which had itself been a vast downgrade from netscape 3.
2) Yes, the previous iteration of slashdot was immensely more accessible, more usable, and better designed. I come here much less frequently now that the site's maintainers have made the poor choice to break compatibility with many browsers. The choice to wed slashdot to CSS is slashdot's problem, not any browser's.
Back in the netscape 4 days, some months after the source release, I remember a coworker having just heard of this new "gecko" rendering engine, and coming excitedly to my desk to show me how amazing it was. He pointed me to where to grab the nearly-naked engine, and then told me to render the same page in it and in my existing netscape window, and marvel at how much faster gecko was.
I opened up some moderately complex page in gecko, and it seemed kind of normal-ish to me. I opened up the same page in a new netscape window, and it was perceptibly faster. He was confused for a moment. "It was way, way faster than netscape on my machine..."
I tried the comparison again with a few other pages, with similar results. Finally he notices something: "Hey, what version of netscape are you running here?"
"3.04," I said. "4 is just a lot slower and crashier than 3, without adding anything worthwhile."
"...oh," he said, disappointed. He had just figured out that this magical open-source revamping of the netscape 4 source had managed to produce something that was... nearly back to as good as netscape 3.
Sadly, I think this situation persists through today. The whole family tree of netscape/gecko browsers seems to have only continued to get worse since 1998, adding nothing that I find desirable, and removing more and more performance and stability.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to pick nits, Overture is still very much in the game. They're still generating a few billion dollars a year for the company that acquired them, Yahoo. It's certainly fair to say that Google is pulling ahead in that race, but nobody's been killed yet.
Steps for creating a phone-friendly website:
1) Use well-written, flexible html to suggest general formatting. Do not attempt pixel-precise layout.
2) Do not rely on ecmascript, flash, css, or any other superfluous nonsense. If you do choose to add such boondoggles to your site, make sure that things function properly without them.
3) Keep in mind that not all clients will display all attributes in the same way. "Strong" may not always mean bold, meanginful alt tags should be used for clients that don't display images, and so on.
You may notice that these are the same steps that are required for creating any civilized website. If you've done things right in the first place, you should not need to know or care whether your clients are 30" displays, text readers, cellphones, search engines, or whatever new context will be popular next year.
I'll admit that I've only looked through the macosx vulnerability section in any detail, but I'm certainly not experiencing anything like the cringing promised by the writeup.
The upshot seemed to be that even when the examiner intentionally turned on every service and did not enable the firewall, the only vulnerabilities found were two timing-based user-enumeration attacks.
That's... that's the big shocking secret? That if I go out of my way to ask my system to be considerably less secure than its default configuration, Mallory out there can find out the names of accounts on my system? Quick, somebody get me some smelling salts!
What is it you mean by Apple not "getting" security? Their security track record has been fairly good for at least the last decade or so, and in the only trait you describe in your post (crediting the reporters of security bugs), they do exactly the same thing as the other organizations you praise.
Most reasonable companies do, in fact, give credit to the reporters of security bugs.
In fact, Apple themselves do give such credit when it's due. But in this particular case, it doesn't appear that the bugs Apple fixed were reported by Ou and Ellch, so crediting them was not appropriate.
It really appears that Mr. Gabriel could have saved you all a lot of time by just jumping straight to his statement at lines 15 and 16 on page 127.
If we had one every month, it'd rise to the level of severity of traffic accidents.
If we had one every week, it'd rise to the level of severity of influenza.
If we had one every four years, it would rise to the level of severity of deaths caused by falling out of bed.
If we say that there's been one WTC-scale terrorist attack in the last fifty years (to circumvent a discussion about whether Pearl Harbor counts), then the closest cause of national mortality I can find is "contact with hornets, wasps and bees".
I don't live my life in fear of bees. I don't find it acceptable for the government to suspend habeas corpus to fight the dire threat of bees. I certainly don't find it acceptable for the government to spend half a trillion dollars on killing several hundred thousand innocent people in order to protect me from bees.
Oh, that's an easy one. Those two positions are not contradictory at all.
Invasive, authoritarian laws like the PATRIOT Act do greatly increase the risk of terrorism (in addition to having many more deleterious effects). But terrorism is a trivial problem in the first place: something that happens with negligible frequency, and harms (on a national scale) a miniscule number of people.
So, yes, the Bush administration is actively working to destroy the Bill of Rights in order to make a trivial problem slightly worse. I do have kind of a problem with that.
As several other people have pointed out to you, going out in public and being exposed to measles is also a volitional choice. You could instead elect you spend your life as a recluse, or wear a CDC bunnysuit your entire life. Of course it's not reasonable to expect most people to choose to do that. Any more than it's reasonable to expect most people to choose to not have sex.
They are both volitional choices, so by your standards the government should have no say in either of them. But you seem to be overlooking the fact that they are both choices that affect the health of your fellow citizens, and thus the government may have a valid reason to be involved.
If you really are interested in convincing people of the merits of your views, allow me to suggest that a clearly reasoned argument will take you considerably further than infantile name-calling.
How charming of you to tell me what I can see and what I know.
I invite you to take a look at my posting history; you'll probably note that I have a strong bent toward being suspicious of governments, and have regularly described the importance of personal liberty and privacy. I am most definitely not in favor of a more authoritarian government, but I think public health is a realm in which governmental involvement can sometimes be beneficial.
It isn't? Then by all means, please present your evidence for "grandchildren missing legs or arms or mentaly retarded because of something done by this vaccine". You have, at the most, pointed out that the vaccine has been around for less than a few decades, so there's some possibility that there are effects that current testing has not yet revealed. Isn't that true of most medicines? Are you suggesting that we should canary all new drugs and therapies for two or three human generations before we ever use them?
Yeah, I have a person-who-reads-the-news level of familiarity with it. It sounds pretty likely that they behaved unethically. So, what, you're on a crusade against every other product Merck ever makes? If every detail about this story were the same except the company that makes the drug, you'd have a different position on it?
You're the one saying that you're in favor of standard vaccinations for polio, smallpox, and measles, yet opposed to standard vaccinations for HPV. And you keep repeating over and over that they're completely categorically different, without actually presenting an argument as to how they're different and why they should be treated differently.
Combined with your assertions that having sex is outside the realm of leading one's normal life, I can't see any conclusion other than you having some hang-up about sex that you're trying to visit on the rest of the world. If, as you say, there's some other reason, feel free to present that argument any day now.
Fair enough, I sit corrected.
I'm kind of amazed that people are reacting to the $400 figure as if it were expensive. I honestly thought the whole point of mentioning it in stories is to point out that this treatment is so incredibly cheap as to border on free.
A $400 vaccination once, or a substantial risk of either experiencing or contributing to someone else's million dollars in cancer treatment, over the course of years of misery and possible fatality. How does this seem like even the most trivially difficult choice?
Unless you're saying that your kids are two years old, allow me to remind you that parents have a millennia-old tendency to vastly overestimate the age at which their children will become sexually active.
The risk of vaccinating too late dwarfs the risk of vaccinating too early.
This seems to be the whole crux of your argument. And unfortunately, it's just flawed.
You seem to be grouping things into "normal" activities like going out in public and "abnormal" activities like having sex. This distinction is arbitrary and meaningless. Having sex is not, as you say, "outside living their daily lives." It is a perfectly normal and reasonable part of living one's daily life.
I'm sorry that you're concerned about your experience with Vioxx. But turning your back on the entirety of medicine because the possibility of side effects exists does not seem like a sane and reasonable response. And condemning hundreds of thousands more women to cervical cancer with your completely evidence-free bogeyman stories of three-headed babies is most certainly not.
Well, that's true in the case of casually-communicated diseases, which jump from host to host indiscriminately.
But HPV basically requires sexual contact in order to be transmitted. Vaccinating all women would isolate the disease to a few populations among gay men (for whom the virus is much less risky) and transmission from bisexual men to women (which would be relatively rare).
I'm not saying that men shouldn't be vaccinated as well, just that it might be jumping the gun a bit to suggest that Merck was intentionally trying to preserve the disease in order to maintain profits.
I've only worked for two of the three (Yahoo to Google), but as far as I've seen _nobody_ wants you to disclose the inner workings of the others to them. This true on at least three levels that come to mind:
- The competitive advantage of knowing about other companies' proprietary information is dwarfed by the liability of acquiring that information. Especially given that you'd be acquiring them through someone who had proven they could not be trusted to keep a secret.
- At least Google has the (mostly deserved) hubris to assume that their own solutions to problems will tend to be as good as or better than other companies' solutions. So while other solutions may be academically interesting, they generally won't be useful.
- Lastly and most significantly, it's unethical. And yes, every person with whom I've worked at either company would find this alone to be reason enough to refrain, even if it did grant a competitive advantage.
Really, everyone would rather just hire competent, trustworthy people who will do their actual job well and with appropriate discretion. No one is looking for a stool pigeon.
I can give you a version of one of the two: powerbooks from the last couple of years have had multi-touch trackpads. And among the things they do with that is acting as a secondary button. A tap with one finger is a primary click, a tap with two fingers is a secondary click. I find it pretty smooth to use, far more so than using the control key.
And I know I can't dictate your preferences to you, but I still just don't understand the obsession with wanting a maximize button. A maximize button struck me as silly back when we were using 9" displays, and it has only gotten sillier since.
I think you're wrong about your "almost everybody" assessment. I know you're wrong about the rest.
Cheaper: Given how many machines have been coming with wireless ethernet standard for about seven years now, there's no significant cost difference. Half the time wired ethernet would cost (trivially) more, just because you need to buy switches and cables for machines that you could instead just tell to talk to one another over hardware they already have.
More reliable: A few people will have range issues or interference issues. Not only is that uncommon, it's something that's pretty much clear at the outset, not generally a problem that will crop up unexpectedly later on. Like, say, a cheap switch or cable going bad. Again, a wash at best.
More secure: Nope. Every packet you send out over the internet is going to pass through many networks out of your control. If you want it private, you'd better encrypt it before it ever leaves your machine. Securing one of the thirty hops between you and your destination buys you nothing.
Faster: I have a 6Mbit/s dsl connection. A few lucky people in my city have 30Mbit/s fiber connections. When residential internet connectivity starts exceeding the speed of residential wireless connectivity, you can talk about faster. Until then, it's not the bottleneck, so it doesn't matter how fast it is.
Now, let's get to the far more important issues that you happened to fail to mention. Wired ethernet requires far more technical expertise of its users. And even for users with entirely sufficient expertise, it's a pain in the ass.
I have three options: I can spend an unpleasant afternoon crawling around under my house doing a good job of wiring it; I can spend an hour inside doing a crappy job of wiring it, with cables running over doorways (and need to re-do it if I ever decide to so much as move a desk); or I can spend four seconds just telling my computers to use the tools they already have to just sort this crap out for me, and never have to think about it again.
Part of the deal with the big four music publishers (and probably movie and television publishers) is that all content sold through the online store gets the same protection scheme. So they couldn't actually sell Disney content sans drm without abrogating their deals with their other content providers.
Oh, and he's the plurality stockholder, but very, very far from being a majority. He is leagues away from being able to make such decisions unilaterally for Disney.
Did you, by any chance, read the actual article? It discusses exactly the ideas you suggest, and presents a reasonable case for why those would not allow them to keep their obligations to the music publishers.
I most definitely am saying that sites should not rely on CSS. I frankly don't care whether sites include CSS, as long as they continue to do the right thing when my browser ignores it.
"Expanding the way people can present things on the internet" is not universally good; whether it's good or bad depends on the particular situation being discussed. Would you be in favor of site publishers replacing all their html with pdfs? Or with Word documents? Or perhaps just with big images of entire pages as they want them to look?
w3m is my browser of choice; I'm posting this using it right now. And I'm afraid that your assessment of the new slashdot's compatibility with it is rather generous.
Slash seems to spit out all of the nav garbage first, then the actual content afterward, and rely on css to rearrange them usefully. Which means that for every single slashdot page I load, I need to scan down through 5-10 pages of noise before I get to any actual content.
While that might make it at least barely possible to use the site, it makes it rather unpleasant. Which is why I've gone from a paying subscriber to an extremely occasional reader.
1) I didn't assert that netscape 4 used gecko. I asserted that gecko was a slight improvement over netscape 4, which had itself been a vast downgrade from netscape 3.
2) Yes, the previous iteration of slashdot was immensely more accessible, more usable, and better designed. I come here much less frequently now that the site's maintainers have made the poor choice to break compatibility with many browsers. The choice to wed slashdot to CSS is slashdot's problem, not any browser's.
Back in the netscape 4 days, some months after the source release, I remember a coworker having just heard of this new "gecko" rendering engine, and coming excitedly to my desk to show me how amazing it was. He pointed me to where to grab the nearly-naked engine, and then told me to render the same page in it and in my existing netscape window, and marvel at how much faster gecko was.
I opened up some moderately complex page in gecko, and it seemed kind of normal-ish to me. I opened up the same page in a new netscape window, and it was perceptibly faster. He was confused for a moment. "It was way, way faster than netscape on my machine..."
I tried the comparison again with a few other pages, with similar results. Finally he notices something: "Hey, what version of netscape are you running here?"
"3.04," I said. "4 is just a lot slower and crashier than 3, without adding anything worthwhile."
"...oh," he said, disappointed. He had just figured out that this magical open-source revamping of the netscape 4 source had managed to produce something that was... nearly back to as good as netscape 3.
Sadly, I think this situation persists through today. The whole family tree of netscape/gecko browsers seems to have only continued to get worse since 1998, adding nothing that I find desirable, and removing more and more performance and stability.