Not exactly. You can get your fix every 4 weeks or so on the roadmap by using alphas and betas. The roadmap says (or at least used to say) that this was an attempt to match what was actually happening (0.9.3, 0.9.5, and 0.9.7 were all of lesser quality than their predecessors because major changes were being introduced.)
And, as someone else has pointed out, you can always get nightlies (or watch the build comments at Mozillazine.org and pick out a nice nightly every week or two).
If that doesn't do it, build from the source. (It's pretty easy, actually.)
From the announcement "The trunk is now open to 1.1 alpha work, on the road to 2.0!" I don't think this is quite the time to open the trunk, but rather the time, as is done with the linux kernel, to get everyone even more focused on the final product.
Keeping the trunk closed says "No, you can't checkin your uber-widget yet, go find something to do on 1.0 for a while first."
Obviously, a closure like this can't last too long, maybe until RC1 or RC2 is released. However, mozilla has recently benifited enormously from what seems to be a real focus on the important things in the puch towards 1.0. A few more weeks of this could really make a tangible improvement in the final product.
To start, telling China and Russia that they "made the short list" is not a way to help smooth out diplomatic relations. The only way to deal with such nations is to convince them that they can satisfy their own best intrests by working with the US rather then against them.
You do both. I'm positive, without actually knowing anything about it, that we are on their "short lists" too. They'd be fools if we weren't. You think China has the nukes its does but its official policy is "We really don't know what we'd do with them?"
We're on China's list. Japan is on their list. India is on their list. South Korea is on their list. Russia is on their list.
Russia's "list" probably looks similar.
Also, though it is my own completely uninformed opinion, but destroying massive amounts of property is not a great way to win a war.
And as many others have pointed out, the reason for the existence of strategic nukes, the kind that do the enormous amounts of damage, is to deter, not to win wars.
You'll notice the last date on this document is September, 1992. The last time we did an underground test.
We haven't tested a device in almost ten years and have no real plans to resume, although to its discredit the Bush administration has begun talking about the possibility.
1) Who is he indicted by? An internationally recognized war crimes tribunal? Or a nation?
2) Why doesn't the anti-Kissinger site you point to have anything in its news archive about how he advocated using nukes in Afganistan? I would think this would be too good of strike against him for your site to pass up.
3) Nixon "told" people to do a lot of crazy things and would then come back the next day and say "You didn't do that, right? Good." So, if you tell me somewhere on tape he said "Nuke 'em" I'll believe you. Otherwise, again, supply a reference. (From an established media outlet or source, not some "Blame America First" site.)
The United States is withdrawing from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty because the language in it prevents the signer nations from developing missile-defense anti-nuke shields. The theory was back in 1973 that if one nation had this technology, they could fire their nukes on another nation and be spared from the concept of mutually assured destruction, (MAD) the idea that if you fire one nuke, you essentially end the world.
That's the ABM treaty, a treaty between just the U.S. and Russia. The CTBT is signed by nearly every civilized nation on earth, (including the U.S.) but ratified by very few (also not including the U.S.). We wouldn't exactly have to withdraw from it. (It's not binding since it isn't ratified.)
Clinton tried to get it ratified in his last couple of years, but had it tabled in the senate because he was going to loose the battle.
If it was just from the trigger, the left over radioactive material would be fairly minimal. Instead, what is usually done is to encase the hydrogen (tritium actually) in additional uranium or plutonium. This increases the yield and produces fall-out. This is a strategic decision, not a technical one, really.
When you hear talk of a "clean bomb," its one without this secondary fissile material.
Of course, the US is the only country to ever use the H-Bomb: and we used it twice.
Uh, no, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atom bombs (U235 and Plutonium). Fission bombs, not Hydrogen-fusion (or H) bombs.
Directly after September 11, I distinctly remember our former Secretary of State advocating the use of Nuclear weapons -- before we had any idea of what an appropriate target would be.
Which "former secretary of state?" I highly doubt this occured. More likely there was some bland statement about not taking any option off the table, the standard U.S. military response when asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Do you have a transcript or something to back up such a claim?
Again, this is use as a deterant. Whether anyone finds this "threat" credible in case like post-Sept. 11 is another matter.
It's not clear Netscape/AOL is collecting this information. From the article:
"We just keep track of aggregate numbers and don't monitor any terms or anything. We just need to know how many people are searching via our browser to our search partners, and that's all the information we receive," he said
It seems like they do this via a re-direct, so they need the search terms. So certainly they are in a position to collect them if they want, but that's somewhat different than saying the are collecting them.
I asked on the mozilla newsgroups, someone did look at the code and saw nothing.
Another person ran behind a firewall which asked about all connections. Netscape6 clearly went to an AOL address before connecting to Google. Mozilla went straight to Google.
So while I personally haven't looked in the code, I'm pretty confident Mozilla is playing it straight on this one.
Not really. Advance copies are usually provided before publication. These are usually available well before the article appears in print. It's certainly not considered unfair to comment on a scientific article in this manner and it happens all the time.
You'll notice the journal and/or the authors have announced the results to the media ahead of the print version being available too.
It's not like a TV station scooping a daily paper out of a story they researched or something like that.
BTW, I wouldn't consider him a professional nay-sayer, but rather skeptical, analytical (both good qualities in a scientist) and out spoken (which can be good or bad).
Heard about this a few days ago from What's New by Bob Park of the American Physical Society. Bob is very hard on Pseudo Science and on bad science policy (read NMD). Here's what he had to say. Note that people who should be able to do this experiment better, can't reproduce it. Don't hold your breath.
BUBBLE FUSION: A COLLECTIVE GROAN CAN BE HEARD.
A report out of Oak Ridge of d-d fusion events in collapsing bubbles formed by cavitation in deuterated acetone, is scheduled for publication in the March 8 issue of Science magazine. Taleyarkan et al. observe 2.5 MeV neutron peaks, evidence of d-d fusion, correlated with sonoluminescence from collapsing bubbles. Pretty exciting stuff huh? It might be, if the experiment had not been repeated by two experienced nuclear physicists, D. Shapira and M.J. Saltmarsh, using the same apparatus, except for superior neutron detection equipment. They found no evidence for 2.5 MeV neutron emission correlated with sonoluminescence. Any neutron emission was many orders of magnitude too small to account for the tritium production reported by the first group. Although distinguished physicists, fearing a repeat of the cold fusion fiasco 13 years ago, advised against publication, the editor has apparently chosen not only to publish the work, but to do so with unusual fanfare, involving even the cover of Science. Perhaps Science magazine covets the vast readership of Infinite Energy magazine.
These are still issues. Some of the text box problems have been fixed recently from what I understand (haven't checked). There are still really annoying problems with text boxes. (See tracking bug 108120 for a list.)
Some of the other complaint he has apply to 0.9.8, which is less than two weeks old.
Remember, in a product this complex some people experience bugs others don't. Some people notice things others don't.
This looks to me to be a very good thing. Finally, we see a long lived mozilla 1.0 branch with real involvement by mozilla.org in producing a quality product.
Beyond that, with the 1.1, 1.2 releases we finally look to be getting something that is a real development scheme rather than the endless series of, what I would call, "technology previews" that earlier versions of mozilla have been. (With the alpha quality that usually goes along with such previews.)
If they stick to this, it seems to me 2002 really could be the year of the lizard.
Don't know about a barcode font, but I print barcodes with gnu-barcode and it reads those OK. (Of course not as good as a $250 Symbol reader, but not bad.)
I use weather-proof Avery labels which are kind of slick (smooth), which probably helps for multiple reads.
To me it always seemed the strangest part of the LGPL license was a requirement to either use shared object libraries or to supply the object files so your propprietary software can be re-linked with a new version of libfoo.a.
Is there an intermediate license which requires that your changes to a library's code be shared, but don't require you to supply the user with the ability to "improve" the program you ship?
It seems to me that recently mozilla has been making less and less
progress towards a really useable release. It seemed to make good
progress up until 0.9.4 or so, but is now languishing.
Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before
Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality
software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't
work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7
is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.
The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this
project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things
already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are
a lot of them) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.
As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put
in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and
never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by
default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have
been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell
is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the
user.
Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your
address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for
1.0? Is
this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at
this point?
Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too
that make it look
less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux
printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a
text edit
widget that worked perfectly, or to be able to
compose
mail with an editor that works.
In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be
included in 0.9.9.
Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for
0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken
even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as
4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem.
In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even
buggier now than
it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.
So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a
new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to
split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe
they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought
on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management. Of course, if you
look at the
mozilla 1.0
manifesto, they've been saying the right words for a long time now:
As we've said often, we're not looking for new features;
we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance,
tolerably few bugs, and good APIs.
Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those
implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs)
and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants,
and other helpers). If you think you must have a feature by 1.0, please
be prepared to say why to drivers, and be prepared to hear "we can't
support work on that feature until after 1.0 has branched" in reply.
But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better
and they really mean it.
Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely
to make against my complaint:
Mozilla is an open source project, so you can't expect organized
development. People are scratching an itch.
Mozilla isn't intended for end users, but as a base for companies to
release a product
1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded
by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun).
This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this
can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if
mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.
2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a
waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same
bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will
distribute mozilla as an end-user product.
So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I
hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for
myself before I install it for people on our systems.
This works out to $60/year. Consider that a home user with a single computer spends about $90 every 2 years to upgrade his/her version of windows. That's buying very upgrade that comes along. Drop that to every four years, and a windows person spends about $20/year.
For these people, RedHat costs 3x more to keep updated than windows. Granted, more software comes with RedHat, even in the stripped down versions.
Still, I think more reasonable support contracts for individuals can only help these distro companies. I've been asking the same from Mandrake every chance I get, but to no avail.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly. You can get your fix every 4 weeks or so on the roadmap by using alphas and betas. The roadmap says (or at least used to say) that this was an attempt to match what was actually happening (0.9.3, 0.9.5, and 0.9.7 were all of lesser quality than their predecessors because major changes were being introduced.)
And, as someone else has pointed out, you can always get nightlies (or watch the build comments at Mozillazine.org and pick out a nice nightly every week or two).
If that doesn't do it, build from the source. (It's pretty easy, actually.)
From the announcement "The trunk is now open to 1.1 alpha work, on the road to 2.0!" I don't think this is quite the time to open the trunk, but rather the time, as is done with the linux kernel, to get everyone even more focused on the final product.
Keeping the trunk closed says "No, you can't checkin your uber-widget yet, go find something to do on 1.0 for a while first."
Obviously, a closure like this can't last too long, maybe until RC1 or RC2 is released. However, mozilla has recently benifited enormously from what seems to be a real focus on the important things in the puch towards 1.0. A few more weeks of this could really make a tangible improvement in the final product.
2000 bugs is impressive, but how many of those
1) Were introduced (or at least discovered) during the 0.9.9 development process
2) Weren't targeted for 0.9.9. It often seems when a bug is targetted for doesn't *really* have a lot to do with when its fixed.
You do both. I'm positive, without actually knowing anything about it, that we are on their "short lists" too. They'd be fools if we weren't. You think China has the nukes its does but its official policy is "We really don't know what we'd do with them?"
We're on China's list. Japan is on their list. India is on their list. South Korea is on their list. Russia is on their list.
Russia's "list" probably looks similar.
Also, though it is my own completely uninformed opinion, but destroying massive amounts of property is not a great way to win a war.
And as many others have pointed out, the reason for the existence of strategic nukes, the kind that do the enormous amounts of damage, is to deter, not to win wars.
Don't put words in my mouth. He made two assertions, one of which was technically wrong and another which is highly suspect.
How do you go from questioning someone's facts to thinking dropping the bomb was the right thing to do? That's quite a leap.
You'll notice the last date on this document is September, 1992. The last time we did an underground test.
We haven't tested a device in almost ten years and have no real plans to resume, although to its discredit the Bush administration has begun talking about the possibility.
I'm not exactly going to defend Kissinger, but:
1) Who is he indicted by? An internationally recognized war crimes tribunal? Or a nation?
2) Why doesn't the anti-Kissinger site you point to have anything in its news archive about how he advocated using nukes in Afganistan? I would think this would be too good of strike against him for your site to pass up.
3) Nixon "told" people to do a lot of crazy things and would then come back the next day and say "You didn't do that, right? Good." So, if you tell me somewhere on tape he said "Nuke 'em" I'll believe you. Otherwise, again, supply a reference. (From an established media outlet or source, not some "Blame America First" site.)
That's the ABM treaty, a treaty between just the U.S. and Russia. The CTBT is signed by nearly every civilized nation on earth, (including the U.S.) but ratified by very few (also not including the U.S.). We wouldn't exactly have to withdraw from it. (It's not binding since it isn't ratified.)
Clinton tried to get it ratified in his last couple of years, but had it tabled in the senate because he was going to loose the battle.
If it was just from the trigger, the left over radioactive material would be fairly minimal. Instead, what is usually done is to encase the hydrogen (tritium actually) in additional uranium or plutonium. This increases the yield and produces fall-out. This is a strategic decision, not a technical one, really.
When you hear talk of a "clean bomb," its one without this secondary fissile material.
Uh, no, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atom bombs (U235 and Plutonium). Fission bombs, not Hydrogen-fusion (or H) bombs.
Directly after September 11, I distinctly remember our former Secretary of State advocating the use of Nuclear weapons -- before we had any idea of what an appropriate target would be.
Which "former secretary of state?" I highly doubt this occured. More likely there was some bland statement about not taking any option off the table, the standard U.S. military response when asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Do you have a transcript or something to back up such a claim?
Again, this is use as a deterant. Whether anyone finds this "threat" credible in case like post-Sept. 11 is another matter.
It seems like they do this via a re-direct, so they need the search terms. So certainly they are in a position to collect them if they want, but that's somewhat different than saying the are collecting them.
Glad I use mozilla and not Netscape though.
I asked on the mozilla newsgroups, someone did look at the code and saw nothing.
Another person ran behind a firewall which asked about all connections. Netscape6 clearly went to an AOL address before connecting to Google. Mozilla went straight to Google.
So while I personally haven't looked in the code, I'm pretty confident Mozilla is playing it straight on this one.
Not really. Advance copies are usually provided before publication. These are usually available well before the article appears in print. It's certainly not considered unfair to comment on a scientific article in this manner and it happens all the time.
You'll notice the journal and/or the authors have announced the results to the media ahead of the print version being available too.
It's not like a TV station scooping a daily paper out of a story they researched or something like that.
BTW, I wouldn't consider him a professional nay-sayer, but rather skeptical, analytical (both good qualities in a scientist) and out spoken (which can be good or bad).
These are still issues. Some of the text box problems have been fixed recently from what I understand (haven't checked). There are still really annoying problems with text boxes. (See tracking bug 108120 for a list.)
Some of the other complaint he has apply to 0.9.8, which is less than two weeks old.
Remember, in a product this complex some people experience bugs others don't. Some people notice things others don't.
This looks to me to be a very good thing. Finally, we see a long lived mozilla 1.0 branch with real involvement by mozilla.org in producing a quality product.
Beyond that, with the 1.1, 1.2 releases we finally look to be getting something that is a real development scheme rather than the endless series of, what I would call, "technology previews" that earlier versions of mozilla have been. (With the alpha quality that usually goes along with such previews.)
If they stick to this, it seems to me 2002 really could be the year of the lizard.
Don't know about a barcode font, but I print barcodes with gnu-barcode and it reads those OK. (Of course not as good as a $250 Symbol reader, but not bad.)
I use weather-proof Avery labels which are kind of slick (smooth), which probably helps for multiple reads.
I joined when their pricing structure was a little better. I get 6 movies out at any time for $28/mo plus tax.
Most of what I want to see isn't the new block buster releases, which is why I was really disappointed with the selection at my local Blockbuster.
I used to live in a town with a great video store, had basically everything, so Netflix kept that type of selection for me.
I probably watch about 15 movies a month for a total of about $2 each compared to $4 for Blockbuster.
It may not be for everyone, but for me it is just the thing. The only problem is not being "in the mood" to watch what you have in the house.
To me it always seemed the strangest part of the LGPL license was a requirement to either use shared object libraries or to supply the object files so your propprietary software can be re-linked with a new version of libfoo.a.
Is there an intermediate license which requires that your changes to a library's code be shared, but don't require you to supply the user with the ability to "improve" the program you ship?
No, it's still totally fubar with 0.9.8
Did you try (under linux) to print the test case from bug 37685?
Currently their servers seem to be having problems, so I'm unable to get 0.9.8, but recent nightlies still had this problem.
Fine, but you'd think they'd want a browser that could replace their other two products (NN 4.7 and AOL/IE client) first, then the doo-dads.
Now, I use mozilla as my regular browser, and have since M18 (before Netscape 6.0), but lets face it, it's still very much alpha-quality software. There are so many little annoyances and things that don't work, I find myself constantly making excuses to my co-workers. 0.9.7 is, IMO, pretty weak with constant crashes and freezes.
The problem, in my opinion, is lack of good leadership. What this project needs is a nearly complete feature freeze, only allowing things already in the UI to be added and any features (and there are a lot of them) still missing that exist in Netscape 4.7.
As an example, look at the recent dust-up with favicons. They were put in, caused regressions in the code that weren't fixed for weeks, and never really worked very well. Now, they are mostly turned off by default, but in the process wasted at least some effort that would have been placed elsewhere. All this for a feature, that as far as I can tell is mostly eye-candy with very little, if any useability benefits to the user.
Now in 0.9.8, we have the ability to get a mapquest map of people in your address book. Is this really the critical kind of feature needed for 1.0? Is this really something mozilla.org wants to start taking bug requests on at this point?
Another example. Tabbed browsing is cool, but there are bugs there too that make it look less than professional. Besides which, I'd give all that up to get a decent printout (shortly before 0.9.8 branched, several very old linux printing bugs were re-targeted for 1.1 or 1.2), a text edit widget that worked perfectly, or to be able to compose mail with an editor that works.
In positive news, it looks like a spell checker might actually be included in 0.9.9. Yet another example, the Mail/News people made things much faster for 0.9.7 but at the expense of introducing more bugs. Threading was broken even more, messages fail to show up. Mozilla has never been as good as 4.7 in the mail/news client department, so this is a major problem. In my brief look at the 0.9.8 pre-releases, it looks like it might be even buggier now than it was in 0.9.7. Another step down, and it might become unuseable.
So, back to management, the drivers should reject any patch that adds a new feature as they push towards mozilla 1.0. Or encourage people to split off an unstable, development branch for feature addition. Maybe they agree with me about a lack of good management since they've brought on Peter Bojanic of OEOne to do project management. Of course, if you look at the mozilla 1.0 manifesto, they've been saying the right words for a long time now:
But, they've pretty much ignored this. Let's hope this time its better and they really mean it.
Before I finish, I'll address the two arguments people are most likely to make against my complaint:
1. The majority, maybe the vast majority, of work on mozilla is still funded by Netscape and to a lesser extent other companies (RedHat, IBM, Sun). This should influence what bugs get fixed. Of course, this can't stop patches with lots of regressions from getting in if mozilla.org has as much autonomy as they say.
2. True, perhaps, but if the base has problems, its impossible or a waste of effort for several companies to run around fixing the same bugs. And then there are the linux distributors who will distribute mozilla as an end-user product.
So, I'm no longer as hopeful about mozilla's prospects as I once was. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to be waiting and trying mozilla 0.9.8 for myself before I install it for people on our systems.
Mandrake 7.2 used KDE 2.0. The 7.2->8.0 jump was either glibc or 2.2->2.4 kernel (by default).
The wierd jump was 6.1 -> 7.0 which as far as I can tell was about their graphical installer.
This works out to $60/year. Consider that a home user with a single computer spends about $90 every 2 years to upgrade his/her version of windows. That's buying very upgrade that comes along. Drop that to every four years, and a windows person spends about $20/year.
For these people, RedHat costs 3x more to keep updated than windows. Granted, more software comes with RedHat, even in the stripped down versions.
Still, I think more reasonable support contracts for individuals can only help these distro companies. I've been asking the same from Mandrake every chance I get, but to no avail.