And any self-respecting Windows sysadmin will know that next Tuesday is Patch Tuesday and that PT (2nd Tues of every month) is when security updates are always released (except for emergency updates released out of cycle, but those are very rare).
So if you're a sysadmin, this is not news--well, at least, this should not be news.
Second, if you're a sysadmin who administers many Windows machines and knowing the number of updates is somewhat important, then you should already know that Microsoft posts announcements about upcoming PT patches a week in advance and you should already know exactly where to see such announcements. You most certainly do not need/. to tell you 24 hours after the fact.
Finally, only 2 of the 6 updates apply to WinXP. Others apply to Vista, Office, Publisher, and other products.
But there's a difference between a druggie who only hurts himself and a small handful of people, and someone who does the dirty work of spreading misinformation that helped get us into a war that has cost billions and affected the lives of millions. Quite frankly, I'd put government misinformation as a crime higher than anything like murder, robbery, whatever; the scale of the effects of the two are just worlds apart.
No, the "liberal" MSM goes after whoever is in power. That's the role of the media, isn't it? As I recall, Bill received quite a lashing from the media over Monica.
Not a very valid comparison. Doctors hiring an assistant expands the scarce resource, time, by trading in money. AMD expanding its scarce resource, money, by... by what?
Okay, so let's say the plants are spun off as an independent entity. Well, this other company will still need to spend money building and upgrading plants, or else AMD will be stuck with a stagnant supplier. Where would this other company get the money to do this? From the money it charges AMD to manufacture the chips, which AMD gets from chip sales... which means that AMD's income will still be siphoned off for plant work.
The only way this could have any meaningful effect beyond a reshuffling of ownership and titles on paper is if by selling off the plants, AMD is able to bring in outside capital that it could otherwise not get. In that respect, AMD selling off the plants is almost akin to them mortgaging them in the financial effect that they can expect.
Ultimately, Apple *is* monopolistic. They eagerly use vertical integration and tightly control the Mac hardware market. Hardware innovation (and I don't mean Apple's fashion innovations like design; I mean pure hardware innovations like better HDDs, better memory, etc.) would not be possible without the open PC market (and then Apple of course reaps that innovation in the PC sphere). Hardware pricing would be higher without the open PC market (downside is that with thin margins, PC makers will often bundle crap, but hey, I can live with that). I shudder at the frightening prospect of a 1984-esque world where Apple dominates. We only cheer Apple today because Jobs hasn't been given enough power for him to demonstrate just how much more dangerous Apple is than even our worst fears about Microsoft (not that Microsoft is saintly).
And how quickly people forget the spat between Safari and KHTML where the latter complained about Apple not always sharing their changes to KHTML. For Apple, the OSS KHTML project was just a convenience--something to get them started. Beyond that, any "openness" Apple professes is just marketing. (and how "open" is Darwin today, huh?)
Going a bit off-topic, for people who talk about pricing, For higher-end systems, Apple's price is comparable because PC makers reap a better profit margin up there. But for lower-end machines--your Mac Mini being a perfect example--Apple's pricing is not comparable. For the price of a $600 mini, you could get a dual-core Dell *with* a LCD monitor. To call a bare-bones Mini with no screen and no upgradeability comparable is incorrect (and for people who like Mini's compactness, remember that $600 will get you a dual-core laptop).
In other words, *something* has to be able to load and process the mouse cursor. And if the thing that loads and processes the mouse cursor falls prey to a buffer overflow, then you've got yourself a vulnerability. Since it's the OS that handles and draws the mouse (so it's not an IE thing; FF will fall prey to this too), it's the OS that handles the mouse cursor, so a buffer overflow there means that it's the OS that gets compromised--the very same thing could happen in any other OS if there was a similar mistake. So they forgot a length check. Shit happens.
I dunno if the Chinese government implicitly okays prostitution. Just because it is prevalent in some contexts does not mean that they condone it. I won't be surprised if they have prostitution "crackdowns" every now and then.
You see, pornography is very prevalent in China; heck it is as prevalent as pirated movies and software in China (keep in mind the estimates that >90% of software is pirated), meaning that there are parts of China where you can literally see this stuff in plain view just be strolling down the street (there is a positive correlation between prevalence and distance from Beijing, so you probably won't see this in Beijing). China does piracy crackdowns every now and then to show people (mostly the congresscritters in Washington) that they do care and will take a tough stance on piracy. Piracy is illegal in China. And you face extremely severe consequences if you are prosecuted. And that, my friend, is the big "if", since it is not uncommon to see cops visiting one of the many small stores selling pirated goods to buy stuff (at a discount, of course) for their own consumption. As I said, porn is quite prevalent. A lot of the places selling pirated movies also sell pirated porn. And you can sometimes even see explicit covers of such products as you are walking down the street because the vendors will sometimes set them up so that they are street-facing.
Sure, they'll throw a few guys in jail now and then, but this is just a show to tell people that the government is Mr. Tough Guy and that violating the laws is Bad For Your Health. But in practice, nobody--including most of the people in government--gives a damn.
The central government is also not that dumb. They know that if they strip people of their sources of pleasure, they will be in trouble (they already have more than enough boiling discontent that they are trying to keep a lid over), so I'm not surprised if they are purposefully limiting their action to a few show cases to just nominally assert their authority while unofficially condoning it. Of course, that probably isn't any consolation for the bloke in jail.
Then people need to develop a tougher skin. What a bland, dull, and conformist world we would live in if everyone asked for permission before offending anyone else. This false "right" to freedom from offense should NEVER EVER trump the true right to expression. In fact, I find this notion of yours to be grossly offensive, but you have the right to that perspective, and I have the right to express my perspective in hopes of convincing you otherwise. But I doubt that you'll be too happy if my right to convince you suddenly got expanded to include coercive means like lawsuits or enacting political correctness laws.
Furthermore, these people are not being held as a captive audience. If they don't like the M$ product, nobody is shoving it down their throat. If M$ sells even one copy of this translated software, then they've got all the justification that they need.
Why are foreigners more competitive? Lower wages for foreigners. Why are foreigner's wages less? Because they have a surplus of population compared to capital. High labor-capital ratio = low wages. Now, the market corrects for this in one of two ways. First, we replace our workers with something cheaper. Either by outsourcing labor. Or importing foreign labor. Or replacing labor with machines (see supermarket checkouts). Or, our wages could adapt... except that it can't due to minimum wage and labor unions. THAT is why are are losing our jobs. Minimum wage and labor unions artificially inflate the price of labor and unless we start want to ban outsourcing, insourcing, and replace-with-computers, then the market WILL find a way to work around that roadblock, much to the detriment of our employment numbers. Killing those artificial wage price supports is the solution, not more draconian government intervention.
But the minimum wage is already too low to live off of, you say. Well, fine, then implement an income-based social welfare scheme (gov't gives everyone a $x stipend) because a scheme like that doesn't work by erecting artificial price floors.
But people must face facts. American dominance has been the product of economic imperialism, and now that system has fallen apart, there will be a rebalancing (with 300m people, we have only 5% of the world's population). Embrace it. Adapt to it. Try to fight it, and you'll end up looking like France, and that ain't a pretty picture.
So you forgot to exclude the poison page in robots.txt... Keep in mind that legit bots (like Google) will obey robot exclusion rules and spambots will ignore them.
Well, nowadays, the free flow of information has given more power to the people. Markets work better as a result because companies are now much more vulnerable to public image/perception than before (just see how much companies spend on preserving brand image these days; catering to disabled people will go a long way towards that).
Second, if we as a society decide that we want to shoulder some of the costs of disabled people, then that's fine. But we need to be careful about *how* we do it. Adding a cost and regulation burden basically helps the mega-corporations because it's a fixed cost that megacorps can spread out over its entire business while small competitors can't do that. The megacorps are also better equipped to handle the paperwork and the fine print details of regulation compliance. For example, according to NPR, a recent proposal for tougher meat safety inspections would hurt a lot of the local small meat packers more than it would hurt the huge packing factories. Ironically, the proposal was aimed to solve the too-many-cows-in-one-place-is-dangerous problem generated in the first place by the big packing factories. It's really ironic how liberals hate megacorps but then go around pushing through all sorts of regulations that make life easier for the megacorps. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make life easier for disabled people, but we must think carefully about HOW we do that. Wouldn't a tax credit for disabled people to offset their increased costs work just as well, but without adding all this undue regulation and burden?
Comparing this to copyright/RIAA is not appropriate. The crux of the anti-ADA argument is that government has no business regulating this stuff in the first place, and because the market can provide a solution of its own ("vote w/ wallet"), then let the free market handle it.
This is NOT how copyright/RIAA works. The RIAA derives its power from the government because copyright is a government-issued monopoly that breaks one aspect of free market economics (music is no longer being sold at the marginal price) in an attempt to fix another aspect of free market economics (the market's failure to reward positive externalities). It's two totally different issues, two totally different markets, and two totally different sets of background principles.
1/ Serving Asians imposes no additional costs compared to serving non-Asians. 2/ Not serving Asians denies the business the revenues from the Asian population. 3/ Therefore, the business loses revenue and does not save significantly on cost. 4/ A rational, profit-maximizing business would be idiotic to not serve Asians (and indeed, when the South decides to collectively lock the blacks out of the economy, they are shooting themselves in the foot economically, but I never said that people are always rational). 5/ This equation does not work for disabled people because installing that ramp and widening that door and printing those braille menus incurs a lot of extra cost. For big megacorps, the extra cost makes sense because they can easily absorb those costs and because they stand to lose a lot from poor public image and from shutting out the disabled people themselves. But small businesses are not big megacorps.
In either case, government intervention is undesirable. In the case of Asians, the market takes care of the problem. In the case of disabled people, the government is forcing a one-size-fits-all solution down people's throats, regardless of whether it makes any sense for the given situation.
Well, Target was stupid. The cost for a big megacorp like Target to do their web design right is low compared to the cost of 1) lost disabled business and 2) lost non-disabled business from people who are morally outraged. And thus, the market takes care of the problem because the market will punish them by denying them profits that they could have had if they just did things right. Why government needs to get involved is beyond me.
Um, rights are negative rights. Government "shall not infringe on...". Positive "rights" are not true rights and are really entitlements. A "right" to a free education does not exist. That's an entitlement. To be sure, free education is a very important entitlement that we cannot do without, but it's still an entitlement, not a right.
Government should step in only if the market fails to address the problem. For the most part, the market takes care of itself. The cost of lost business (given how much big corporations spend on advertising to lure in all sorts of people, they do place a lot of value on snagging every last customer) and the cost of a tarnished image (which can counteract any marketing or brand-building and cause a loss of regular non-disabled customers who turn away in protest) is generally much higher than the cost of putting in a ramp or a wide door. For smaller businesses, this cost equation may work out differently. And so they should decide for themselves if it's worth it. It is not the government's job to decide for them if it's worth it, and it is most certainly not the government's job to then shove the government's evaluation of the situation down their throats.
If people think that this is a moral travesty, that's fine. Vote with your wallet, so that they will lose not only the disabled customers but the regular customers. But to resort to the coercive force that is government to do your bidding is not acceptable.
Hmm. I guess mileage may vary. My experience is that there have been a couple of bugs that I saw in 1.5 that were fixed. It is very likely that I have not been to the sites that you talk about. But I suppose we could agree that this is at least a mixed bag instead of a total downside.
Well, Mr. Critic, have you actually *tried* Firefox 2? If you did, you'll see that it is noticeably faster than earlier incarnations of Firefox. Plus, it's faster than IE7 and uses less memory usage than IE7. Don't mistake the ravings of one misguided 9-reasons blog post for the opinion of the community, and don't make the mistake of thinking that FUD is actually representative of the real concerns surrounding FF2.
2) Anti-phishing: better than nothing; BTW, it's the same anti-phishing technology used in the Google Toolbar
3) FF2 options dialog is a lot like FF1.5's options dialog. Not much change.
4) The extension authors tend to be slow to update. The whole point of Beta1/2 and RC1/2/3 was to give developers, especially extension developers, ample time to update their extensions. If they don't make use of that time, it's their fault for not supporting their users. But on that note, very little changed API-wise between FF1.5 and FF2, so much extension updates involve nothing more than bumping the "maxVersion" string. If that's the case, you can disable extension compatibility checking in about:config and force 1.5 extensions to be accepted in 2.0. That's what I do, and I encounter no problems.
5) Show me a piece of software with no memory leak issues. 5a) FACT: IE7 uses *MORE* memory for the same number of tabs and sites. 5b) FACT: FF2 is MUCH better than FF1.5 in the memory leak department. 5c) FACT: Many of the memory leaks are actually caused by extensions. And there are a LOT of poorly-written leaking extensions out there (in fact, switching from the SessionSaver extension to the built-in session saver in FF2 brought about a very noticeable change). 5d) People forget that webpages these days require lots of memory now that people are using more an more images. And remember that when an image is displayed, it is decompressed into a raw format in memory (since compressed formats like JPEG and PNG are for storage and transport only) and people forget about that effect on memory.
6) It's better than 1.5's CSS engine. It's certainly not a perfect engine, but it's a hell of a lot better than IE7 (now if some sites decide to make use of incorrect behavior in IE7's CSS engine, that's their problem for not following W3C specs).
7) I can't speak for other others, but I have not encountered this. And I have been using Firefox 2 for well over a month, ever since RC1 was spun in mid-late September. Keep in mind that most of the bugs that people report with Firefox are actually the result of crappily-developed extensions.
8) No comment.
9) How could it possibly be a step backwards. 1.5 showed RSS feeds as raw XML. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how a pretty display of RSS feeds is worse than a XML parse tree. 1.5 also didn't give people much options on what to do with them: only live bookmarks were available. 2.0 now lets you pick an aggregator of your choice. Explain to me how this is worse?
That's one of the things that will be addressed in beta5, which has been announced on the Gaim website and which Sean promises will be released very soon.
Yes. Mozilla finals are always identical to the most recent RC. So in a way, FF2 was released last week. And the nightly people had access to it two weeks ago when RC3 was first spun on the 10th.:P
The funny thing is, SessionSaver's notorious memory problems is probably the reason why you were restarting so much.;) Being able to give SS the boot was probably the single biggest benefit for me upgrading to FF2.
Slashdot Mirror
And any self-respecting Windows sysadmin will know that next Tuesday is Patch Tuesday and that PT (2nd Tues of every month) is when security updates are always released (except for emergency updates released out of cycle, but those are very rare).
/. to tell you 24 hours after the fact.
So if you're a sysadmin, this is not news--well, at least, this should not be news.
Second, if you're a sysadmin who administers many Windows machines and knowing the number of updates is somewhat important, then you should already know that Microsoft posts announcements about upcoming PT patches a week in advance and you should already know exactly where to see such announcements. You most certainly do not need
Finally, only 2 of the 6 updates apply to WinXP. Others apply to Vista, Office, Publisher, and other products.
And so have every President.
But there's a difference between a druggie who only hurts himself and a small handful of people, and someone who does the dirty work of spreading misinformation that helped get us into a war that has cost billions and affected the lives of millions. Quite frankly, I'd put government misinformation as a crime higher than anything like murder, robbery, whatever; the scale of the effects of the two are just worlds apart.
And no, I'm not a liberal. I'm a libertarian.
No, the "liberal" MSM goes after whoever is in power. That's the role of the media, isn't it? As I recall, Bill received quite a lashing from the media over Monica.
Not a very valid comparison. Doctors hiring an assistant expands the scarce resource, time, by trading in money. AMD expanding its scarce resource, money, by... by what?
Okay, so let's say the plants are spun off as an independent entity. Well, this other company will still need to spend money building and upgrading plants, or else AMD will be stuck with a stagnant supplier. Where would this other company get the money to do this? From the money it charges AMD to manufacture the chips, which AMD gets from chip sales... which means that AMD's income will still be siphoned off for plant work.
The only way this could have any meaningful effect beyond a reshuffling of ownership and titles on paper is if by selling off the plants, AMD is able to bring in outside capital that it could otherwise not get. In that respect, AMD selling off the plants is almost akin to them mortgaging them in the financial effect that they can expect.
Agreed!
Ultimately, Apple *is* monopolistic. They eagerly use vertical integration and tightly control the Mac hardware market. Hardware innovation (and I don't mean Apple's fashion innovations like design; I mean pure hardware innovations like better HDDs, better memory, etc.) would not be possible without the open PC market (and then Apple of course reaps that innovation in the PC sphere). Hardware pricing would be higher without the open PC market (downside is that with thin margins, PC makers will often bundle crap, but hey, I can live with that). I shudder at the frightening prospect of a 1984-esque world where Apple dominates. We only cheer Apple today because Jobs hasn't been given enough power for him to demonstrate just how much more dangerous Apple is than even our worst fears about Microsoft (not that Microsoft is saintly).
And how quickly people forget the spat between Safari and KHTML where the latter complained about Apple not always sharing their changes to KHTML. For Apple, the OSS KHTML project was just a convenience--something to get them started. Beyond that, any "openness" Apple professes is just marketing. (and how "open" is Darwin today, huh?)
Going a bit off-topic, for people who talk about pricing, For higher-end systems, Apple's price is comparable because PC makers reap a better profit margin up there. But for lower-end machines--your Mac Mini being a perfect example--Apple's pricing is not comparable. For the price of a $600 mini, you could get a dual-core Dell *with* a LCD monitor. To call a bare-bones Mini with no screen and no upgradeability comparable is incorrect (and for people who like Mini's compactness, remember that $600 will get you a dual-core laptop).
Riiiiiiight. Just ask the KHTML guys how open they think Apple really are...
Well, for starters, changing the mouse cursor is a part of the official W3C CSS specs...
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/ui.html#propdef-cursor
In other words, *something* has to be able to load and process the mouse cursor. And if the thing that loads and processes the mouse cursor falls prey to a buffer overflow, then you've got yourself a vulnerability. Since it's the OS that handles and draws the mouse (so it's not an IE thing; FF will fall prey to this too), it's the OS that handles the mouse cursor, so a buffer overflow there means that it's the OS that gets compromised--the very same thing could happen in any other OS if there was a similar mistake. So they forgot a length check. Shit happens.
Incorrect. The ANI vulnerability affects Firefox as well.
I dunno if the Chinese government implicitly okays prostitution. Just because it is prevalent in some contexts does not mean that they condone it. I won't be surprised if they have prostitution "crackdowns" every now and then.
You see, pornography is very prevalent in China; heck it is as prevalent as pirated movies and software in China (keep in mind the estimates that >90% of software is pirated), meaning that there are parts of China where you can literally see this stuff in plain view just be strolling down the street (there is a positive correlation between prevalence and distance from Beijing, so you probably won't see this in Beijing). China does piracy crackdowns every now and then to show people (mostly the congresscritters in Washington) that they do care and will take a tough stance on piracy. Piracy is illegal in China. And you face extremely severe consequences if you are prosecuted. And that, my friend, is the big "if", since it is not uncommon to see cops visiting one of the many small stores selling pirated goods to buy stuff (at a discount, of course) for their own consumption. As I said, porn is quite prevalent. A lot of the places selling pirated movies also sell pirated porn. And you can sometimes even see explicit covers of such products as you are walking down the street because the vendors will sometimes set them up so that they are street-facing.
Sure, they'll throw a few guys in jail now and then, but this is just a show to tell people that the government is Mr. Tough Guy and that violating the laws is Bad For Your Health. But in practice, nobody--including most of the people in government--gives a damn.
The central government is also not that dumb. They know that if they strip people of their sources of pleasure, they will be in trouble (they already have more than enough boiling discontent that they are trying to keep a lid over), so I'm not surprised if they are purposefully limiting their action to a few show cases to just nominally assert their authority while unofficially condoning it. Of course, that probably isn't any consolation for the bloke in jail.
Then people need to develop a tougher skin. What a bland, dull, and conformist world we would live in if everyone asked for permission before offending anyone else. This false "right" to freedom from offense should NEVER EVER trump the true right to expression. In fact, I find this notion of yours to be grossly offensive, but you have the right to that perspective, and I have the right to express my perspective in hopes of convincing you otherwise. But I doubt that you'll be too happy if my right to convince you suddenly got expanded to include coercive means like lawsuits or enacting political correctness laws.
Furthermore, these people are not being held as a captive audience. If they don't like the M$ product, nobody is shoving it down their throat. If M$ sells even one copy of this translated software, then they've got all the justification that they need.
Why are foreigners more competitive? Lower wages for foreigners. Why are foreigner's wages less? Because they have a surplus of population compared to capital. High labor-capital ratio = low wages. Now, the market corrects for this in one of two ways. First, we replace our workers with something cheaper. Either by outsourcing labor. Or importing foreign labor. Or replacing labor with machines (see supermarket checkouts). Or, our wages could adapt... except that it can't due to minimum wage and labor unions. THAT is why are are losing our jobs. Minimum wage and labor unions artificially inflate the price of labor and unless we start want to ban outsourcing, insourcing, and replace-with-computers, then the market WILL find a way to work around that roadblock, much to the detriment of our employment numbers. Killing those artificial wage price supports is the solution, not more draconian government intervention.
But the minimum wage is already too low to live off of, you say. Well, fine, then implement an income-based social welfare scheme (gov't gives everyone a $x stipend) because a scheme like that doesn't work by erecting artificial price floors.
But people must face facts. American dominance has been the product of economic imperialism, and now that system has fallen apart, there will be a rebalancing (with 300m people, we have only 5% of the world's population). Embrace it. Adapt to it. Try to fight it, and you'll end up looking like France, and that ain't a pretty picture.
So you forgot to exclude the poison page in robots.txt... Keep in mind that legit bots (like Google) will obey robot exclusion rules and spambots will ignore them.
That is true.
But Target's failure to comply with basic design principles isn't an excuse for government intervention, either.
Well, nowadays, the free flow of information has given more power to the people. Markets work better as a result because companies are now much more vulnerable to public image/perception than before (just see how much companies spend on preserving brand image these days; catering to disabled people will go a long way towards that).
Second, if we as a society decide that we want to shoulder some of the costs of disabled people, then that's fine. But we need to be careful about *how* we do it. Adding a cost and regulation burden basically helps the mega-corporations because it's a fixed cost that megacorps can spread out over its entire business while small competitors can't do that. The megacorps are also better equipped to handle the paperwork and the fine print details of regulation compliance. For example, according to NPR, a recent proposal for tougher meat safety inspections would hurt a lot of the local small meat packers more than it would hurt the huge packing factories. Ironically, the proposal was aimed to solve the too-many-cows-in-one-place-is-dangerous problem generated in the first place by the big packing factories. It's really ironic how liberals hate megacorps but then go around pushing through all sorts of regulations that make life easier for the megacorps. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make life easier for disabled people, but we must think carefully about HOW we do that. Wouldn't a tax credit for disabled people to offset their increased costs work just as well, but without adding all this undue regulation and burden?
Comparing this to copyright/RIAA is not appropriate. The crux of the anti-ADA argument is that government has no business regulating this stuff in the first place, and because the market can provide a solution of its own ("vote w/ wallet"), then let the free market handle it.
This is NOT how copyright/RIAA works. The RIAA derives its power from the government because copyright is a government-issued monopoly that breaks one aspect of free market economics (music is no longer being sold at the marginal price) in an attempt to fix another aspect of free market economics (the market's failure to reward positive externalities). It's two totally different issues, two totally different markets, and two totally different sets of background principles.
(I'm an Asian, BTW)...
1/ Serving Asians imposes no additional costs compared to serving non-Asians.
2/ Not serving Asians denies the business the revenues from the Asian population.
3/ Therefore, the business loses revenue and does not save significantly on cost.
4/ A rational, profit-maximizing business would be idiotic to not serve Asians (and indeed, when the South decides to collectively lock the blacks out of the economy, they are shooting themselves in the foot economically, but I never said that people are always rational).
5/ This equation does not work for disabled people because installing that ramp and widening that door and printing those braille menus incurs a lot of extra cost. For big megacorps, the extra cost makes sense because they can easily absorb those costs and because they stand to lose a lot from poor public image and from shutting out the disabled people themselves. But small businesses are not big megacorps.
In either case, government intervention is undesirable. In the case of Asians, the market takes care of the problem. In the case of disabled people, the government is forcing a one-size-fits-all solution down people's throats, regardless of whether it makes any sense for the given situation.
Well, Target was stupid. The cost for a big megacorp like Target to do their web design right is low compared to the cost of 1) lost disabled business and 2) lost non-disabled business from people who are morally outraged. And thus, the market takes care of the problem because the market will punish them by denying them profits that they could have had if they just did things right. Why government needs to get involved is beyond me.
Um, rights are negative rights. Government "shall not infringe on...". Positive "rights" are not true rights and are really entitlements. A "right" to a free education does not exist. That's an entitlement. To be sure, free education is a very important entitlement that we cannot do without, but it's still an entitlement, not a right.
Government should step in only if the market fails to address the problem. For the most part, the market takes care of itself. The cost of lost business (given how much big corporations spend on advertising to lure in all sorts of people, they do place a lot of value on snagging every last customer) and the cost of a tarnished image (which can counteract any marketing or brand-building and cause a loss of regular non-disabled customers who turn away in protest) is generally much higher than the cost of putting in a ramp or a wide door. For smaller businesses, this cost equation may work out differently. And so they should decide for themselves if it's worth it. It is not the government's job to decide for them if it's worth it, and it is most certainly not the government's job to then shove the government's evaluation of the situation down their throats.
If people think that this is a moral travesty, that's fine. Vote with your wallet, so that they will lose not only the disabled customers but the regular customers. But to resort to the coercive force that is government to do your bidding is not acceptable.
Hmm. I guess mileage may vary. My experience is that there have been a couple of bugs that I saw in 1.5 that were fixed. It is very likely that I have not been to the sites that you talk about. But I suppose we could agree that this is at least a mixed bag instead of a total downside.
Well, Mr. Critic, have you actually *tried* Firefox 2? If you did, you'll see that it is noticeably faster than earlier incarnations of Firefox. Plus, it's faster than IE7 and uses less memory usage than IE7. Don't mistake the ravings of one misguided 9-reasons blog post for the opinion of the community, and don't make the mistake of thinking that FUD is actually representative of the real concerns surrounding FF2.
1) Theme: matter of personal opinion
2) Anti-phishing: better than nothing; BTW, it's the same anti-phishing technology used in the Google Toolbar
3) FF2 options dialog is a lot like FF1.5's options dialog. Not much change.
4) The extension authors tend to be slow to update. The whole point of Beta1/2 and RC1/2/3 was to give developers, especially extension developers, ample time to update their extensions. If they don't make use of that time, it's their fault for not supporting their users. But on that note, very little changed API-wise between FF1.5 and FF2, so much extension updates involve nothing more than bumping the "maxVersion" string. If that's the case, you can disable extension compatibility checking in about:config and force 1.5 extensions to be accepted in 2.0. That's what I do, and I encounter no problems.
5) Show me a piece of software with no memory leak issues.
5a) FACT: IE7 uses *MORE* memory for the same number of tabs and sites.
5b) FACT: FF2 is MUCH better than FF1.5 in the memory leak department.
5c) FACT: Many of the memory leaks are actually caused by extensions. And there are a LOT of poorly-written leaking extensions out there (in fact, switching from the SessionSaver extension to the built-in session saver in FF2 brought about a very noticeable change).
5d) People forget that webpages these days require lots of memory now that people are using more an more images. And remember that when an image is displayed, it is decompressed into a raw format in memory (since compressed formats like JPEG and PNG are for storage and transport only) and people forget about that effect on memory.
6) It's better than 1.5's CSS engine. It's certainly not a perfect engine, but it's a hell of a lot better than IE7 (now if some sites decide to make use of incorrect behavior in IE7's CSS engine, that's their problem for not following W3C specs).
7) I can't speak for other others, but I have not encountered this. And I have been using Firefox 2 for well over a month, ever since RC1 was spun in mid-late September. Keep in mind that most of the bugs that people report with Firefox are actually the result of crappily-developed extensions.
8) No comment.
9) How could it possibly be a step backwards. 1.5 showed RSS feeds as raw XML. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how a pretty display of RSS feeds is worse than a XML parse tree. 1.5 also didn't give people much options on what to do with them: only live bookmarks were available. 2.0 now lets you pick an aggregator of your choice. Explain to me how this is worse?
That's one of the things that will be addressed in beta5, which has been announced on the Gaim website and which Sean promises will be released very soon.
Yes. Mozilla finals are always identical to the most recent RC. So in a way, FF2 was released last week. And the nightly people had access to it two weeks ago when RC3 was first spun on the 10th. :P
*agrees* In addition, there shouldn't be any sort of major change between Gecko 1.8 and 1.8.1 (FF1.5->FF2).
The funny thing is, SessionSaver's notorious memory problems is probably the reason why you were restarting so much. ;) Being able to give SS the boot was probably the single biggest benefit for me upgrading to FF2.