Having different applications for different types of data usually make sense, if only to limit the amount of options presented to the user so they can make an intelligent decision about what action they want to perform.
I agree wholeheartedly that unifying desktop applications into one nebulous interface isn't a very useful way to give users access to their data. Mail clients make good mail clients, but they make lousy photo gallery browsers.
That said, what I do wish we'd see more of is an effort for different applications to share the same information, because the dividing line between which application to use is much clearer than the dividing line between which application should be the keeper of particular types of data.
I don't want to have to open my web browser to see if I've bookmarked a URI that somebody mentioned in an IRC channel. I also don't want to have to open my PIM to find the phone number of somebody who I'm talking to in that IRC channel.
These are the sorts of data access issues I'd like to see resolved, and I do see RDF as a possible, even attractive, approach to solving the problem. However, as you've pointed out, we can't simply modify our applications to all spit out RDF, and expect everything to fall into place. Some degree of consensus about how to represent data is required. Rather than writing new applications like Haystack, or looking for new approaches to managing one's information, I'd rather see efforts to modify existing applications to share data sources more effectively.
Using the right tool for the job
on
OpenGL in PHP
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· Score: 5, Insightful
But I have a hard time coming up with things that we've discovered because a person actually went along to accompany an experiment.
I suppose it's simplistic, but what about experiments that look for answers about humans? For example, research into the effects of zero gravity on the body and ways to combat it.
Of course, research into keeping humans healthy in space is only beneficial if you believe that we should explore space at all. But if someone doesn't believe we should explore space at all, I see little point in discussing the space program at all with them. All I'm left with is this nagging feeling that they wouldn't have considered colonization of the Americas to be worth the trouble.
Another project I'd like to cite is the Hubble, which, while not necessarily an endeavor requiring humans to deploy it, did require humans to fix the thing. I'm certain that without a manned space program, the Hubble would've been launched, declared broken, and promptly abandoned. Why? Well, I think they would've deemed the cost involved in developing some sort of robotic repair crew to be prohibitive. Easier to just ditch it and try again.
I'm entering the site completely fine regardless of what browser identification I send. Opera 7.2b2, Netscape 3.0, 4.78, 5.0 MSIE 6.0... All the same... So, er, bullshit?
Do you have JS disabled? The check is being done in JS, so turning it off will allow non-IE users in. Of course, if you were interested in the truth rather than just assuming the parent was making it up, you could've done a simple check of the page source/headers for signs of redirection.
It's right there in the <head>
var mac = navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac")>-1 var opera = navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Opera")>-1 //IE5+ required if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && !mac && !opera) {
musicLink = false
window.location.href="/ierequired.htm"; }
Not the first site to be dumb enough to shut out the non-IE/Win crowd, and it won't be the last either. Hell, even MSN's tried it.
It may not be a crime, but it may also not be realistic.
There is a remarkably arrogant attitude here in the US that we Americans are born with a soverign right to get paid more than someone with equivilant skills in other countries, and the coming years are going to give a lot of Americans expecting to live better than their foreign counterparts a serious moment of pause.
IBM needs programmers. They can hire one American, or three people in another country. To a business, it's a no brainer. Sensible economics. Will it have a downard effect on the standard of living in the US? Yes, probably. Maybe we're due (or overdue) for that to happen.
At my font size, the first line of the Mozilla Firebird product box ends up reading:
"Mozilla Firebird 0.6 - A Lean, Mean Bugzilla Browsing Machine"
I read straight over the border, possibly because there was only 1px of space between 'Mean' and the border. Maybe Bugzilla should go down below firebird instead of next to it.
Not to say that Firebird doesn't do an excellent job of rendering and navigating Bugzilla...:)
To change the license you must also have the permission of everyone who is using the software. Once you have released something to the public domain there is no change you can take it out, it is just nonsense.
Correct. Once Application X 1.0 is released under the GPL, the author(s) cannot change that.
The maker of a software has no "unilateral" right to change the license once the program has been sold or distributed (unless the license explictly allows that I guess).
Incorrect. Just because Application X 1.0 was released under the GPL does not bind the author(s) to using the GPL for 2.0. If you'd re-read my original post, you'll see I already addressed this, by pointing out that a license cannot be retroactively changed.
Remember that anyone can make changes to GPL:d program so it is simply impossible to get a permission from everyone that has changed the source in any way.
Incorrect. Until a given user's changes to Application X are accepted by the author(s), that user has no claim to Application X. Now, that user is free to redistribute Application X with his changes, and call it Application Y, provided he do so under the GPL, or a compatible license.
My point exactly. If I had originally created Application X and licensed it under the GPL, accepted patches from people who understood the application was GPL, then I can no longer close source my application.
You can, actually, and many projects have done exactly that (Although usually they just change the license, rather than close the source). You simply need the consent of everybody who can make a legit claim to part of the source. Of course, gathering up all that approval isn't always easy. See, for example, the rather large Mozilla Relicensing FAQ
What you can't do is retroactively close the source of an app. So while you could take Application X, currently under the GPL, and make future versions closed, the GPL'd versions wouldn't be covered. This allows other people to continue working on the GPL version.
ok, this is one retailer, one that, quite frankly, not too many people use for their software needs
Always the best way to test out a new idea; a small segment of the market where it won't raise too many eyebrows. (See the introduction of DRM by record labels into CD's that savvy consumers would never buy, as a testing ground) That being said, as it's been pointed out in other comments, this was a decision by Office Depot. Of course, that doesn't mean it wasn't a decision encouraged by MS. I wouldn't put it past them at all to recommend the idea to other, more significant vendors.
if this "drm" "secure computing" bullshit continues, which i very very seriously doubt it will, many people will make the switch to mac os, or linux
Yes, let's put our faith in the wisdom of the consumers to think about the implications of the technology they probably won't even realize is being introduced. Because, after all, we all know how well consumers see through clever ad campaigns and shiny boxes.
Yep, we're safe. Enough of the Windows userbase will switch OS's when DRM becomes common that it won't be a problem. Everything will be just fine.
On second thought.. Consumers are hapless sheep. Let's NOT trust their intelligence, and instead be proactive about combating a danger (DRM) that 99% of the market won't see coming, and won't understand when it gets here.
Actually, when compared with what a simple CSS and DOM modification can do to make a smallscreen version of a page (As demonstrated here), Opera's method stops looking all that impressive.
As the AC mentioned, the grippers to collapse toolbars were removed for usability reasons. The details, if you really want to know (or just skim) are chronicled in several bug reports. Here's one of them.
Actually, IE6 does a decent job. Their DOM1 support is good, their CSS1 is more or less complete, but their CSS2 is pretty crappy. Fixed positioning doesn't work, selectors like E[attr] are missing, etc.
Lately I've been working on an app for a company's internal use, which means the delightful situation of being able to dictate minimum browser requirements. As a result, the app is designed for IE6/Mozilla. All development has been in Mozilla, and a lot of DOM use goes on. And it all works in IE6, no browser checking anywhere. My only regrets is I can't make use of the more advanced selectors provided by CSS2, so the HTML has a few more class attributes than it would need otherwise. But, overall, not bad.
Another positive note, IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml. So at last, XHTML documents can be sent with the proper mime type.
So despite being a Mozilla (Galeon) user, as a web developer who makes heavy use of modern standards, I look forward to seeing IE continue to catch up to Mozilla so that I can worry even less about browser-specific issues.
Aside: I have no idea why he'd be using Explorer to code Javascript, anyway, since that browser gives very little feedback when you have bugs in your scripts. Mozilla's DOM Inspector and Javascript console are some of the very best tools *any* javascript hacker ever got. They give very helpful feedback, are easy to use, and make development a thousand times easier.
I can't agree with you more. The DOM inspector flat out kicks ass. Never before has there been a tool as useful for digging into the structure of a document to figure out what's going on (Or maybe,w hat's going wrong)
There's also a lot to be said for opening up that JS console and running commands to manipulate the document you're looking at, without having to bother saving to a script. The JS console definitely leaves IE in the dust when it comes to handling JS errors. (IE's idea of a JS error is 'object does not contain that property')
Of course, it's a proprietary solution. A much better option is to implement a similar editing tool in JS/DOM that works in both Moz and IE6+ (Maybe Opera 7 if it actually includes some respectable DOM support)
He also complained about Mozilla's vaunted "standards compliance." His exact words: "Mozilla invents its own standards, and it's the only one to comply to them."
For the most part, this is only true if your friend believes that the W3 is a subsidiary of AOL. Needless to say, it isn't, and in fact many of the standards which Mozilla follows (While IE only sorta follows) were written by groups that included representatives from Microsoft. A partial list of the (real, non-Mozilla invented) standards that Mozilla enforces can be found here.
Isn't javascript "write once, run anyware" kinda stuff?
It'd be nice, wouldn't it.
JavaScript is a Netscape invention, always has been. As such, Netscape did write its own standard and is the only one to comply with it. However, there IS a real standard known as ECMAScript that Moz and IE both do a reasonably good job of supporting. Unfortunately, this does not cover everything. ECMAScript can be thought of as defining the 'core' of what scripting on browsers is often used for.
Beyond the core are the areas of scripting that make up the buzzword-compliant DHTML (Dynamic HTML, a fancy way of saying JS, CSS, and HTML)
This is where cross-browser scripting gets hairy. The standards used for manipulating documents dynamically are collectively defined by the W3 as the DOM, or Document Object Model, which has many uses outside of HTML, but we'll stick to its HTML uses for now. Unfortunately, some of the more advanced elements of the DOM are still in a drafting phase, and as such are not ready to be used as standards. Meanwhile, browsers implement support in their own ways, lacking any sort of rules to adhere to. It's my hope that as these drafts are finalized into W3 Recommendations, that MS will include support for them as I know Mozilla will. Until then, browser detection will continue being a way of life for advanced client side scripting.
How many webserver administrators have the skills to look at the Apache sourcecode (or in this case, the OpenSSL sourcecode), find the bug, and fix it?
All the skill it should take is to apt-get upgrade or up2date, or whatever the distro in question uses for updates. Debian woody had the patch posted immediately. So the skills needed to update your Apache system are no different from those needed to patch code red (Which, a year after its creation, is still roaming around)
The often tauted ability to "go in and fix things" or even to simply "contribute" is highly overrated. Who found and fixed this bug? Was it some random user, or one of the original developers?
Well, judging by the advisory from the OpenSSL team (Dated July 30, btw, this is hardly a new issue) and a cursory glance over the developer list, the advisory issue was not found by anyone on the development team. So, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you. I consider the ability of users to find and patch security vulnerabilities to be a benefit of free software that simply cannot be overstated.
Having said that, I'll concede the obvious. Most end users are not skilled in the ways of finding or fixing bugs. However, there are zero end users of proprietary tools who even have the option of patching security holes in the software upon which they depend.
So, while some may say "But any user can find/fix security holes when it's free software!" I'll simply say "But any user has the freedom to find/fix security holes when it's free software!" Whether or not the user has the skills is irrelevant, what's important is that the option is there.
I want to see more episodes of Burke's "Connections".
Hell yeah. I'd never even heard of Connections until I got cable and saw it on Discover Science. Awesome stuff, history filled to the brim with fascinating trivia. You'll never hear about this stuff in your history classes.
Burke was rumored to have done some speaking here in Portland recently, but I missed it. Want to see him speak, along with Spalding Gray.
but WinForms and ADO are the only things not submitted to ECMA
I've mentioned this before, but I'm always happy to squelch misinformation, so I'll repeat. The only things that have been submitted to the ECMA are C# and the CLI. The rest is not. Let me say that again. No part of the.NET framework has been submitted.
Right, AOL isn't developing Mozilla the browser, AOL is developing Mozilla the application development framework.
So much time has been invested in making Mozilla into such a framework that it would be naive to think AOL just wants a good browser to replace IE with. There are much more interesting, and far more elaborate uses for Mozilla that AOL can use in its fight against MS.
Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively. This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases.
Release processes do take time, and Debian woody's started long before KDE3 or XFree86 4.2 were released. It is not the policy of the Debian team to drop everything mid-release-prep and package the latest version of some package, regardless of how significant it may be. If that was the case, releases would take a great deal more time.
If you want to see the process go faster, feel free to step up and help out.
Still, sad that people have to copy-and-paste articles word-for-word:-(
Ah, well then my appoligies. It is a pretty sad state of affairs when one feels compelled to post on Slashdot so badly, yet can't think of anything intelligent to say, and proceeds to steal someone else's thoughts.
I'm also disappointed to see people like you are still supporting Levin as I have seen him insult and hurt the feelings of innocent developers trying to use "OPN for what it is intended for" for no apparent reason. The abuse of power can't just be shrugged off; the issue must be addressed -- and the best way of doing so is by providing a community-driven alternative.
Interesting that since I didn't outright slam Rob in my post, you assume that I support his actions.
Regardless, I do not see how one can assert that OPN is not community driven, considering the thousands of people that regularly sign on. As a long time regular in a handful of channels, I feel fairly confident saying there is indeed a strong community there, and that I am a part of it.
Frankly, I consider starting an alternate network over the behavior of one staffer to be a foolish waste of the resources that have been invested in OPN by countless individuals who are not Rob Levin. It seems to me a far more prudent solution would be to have him step down, rather than to encourage an exodous from a perfectly good network.
But then, according to the Open Source naysayers, it's a standard Open Source tactic to fork a project rather than contribute to fixing it.
I'm disappointed with your dismissal of OPN
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DotGNU Meet-a-thon
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· Score: 2
You have every right to disagree with Rob Levin's behavior. Lots of people do. But how does this have anything to do with the decision to use OPN for what it is intended for?
If you consider it a successful forum for Open Source developers, and you have nothing but respect for the other staffers, I don't understand why there is cause to discourage the use of OPN.
Slashdot Mirror
Having different applications for different types of data usually make sense, if only to limit the amount of options presented to the user so they can make an intelligent decision about what action they want to perform.
I agree wholeheartedly that unifying desktop applications into one nebulous interface isn't a very useful way to give users access to their data. Mail clients make good mail clients, but they make lousy photo gallery browsers.
That said, what I do wish we'd see more of is an effort for different applications to share the same information, because the dividing line between which application to use is much clearer than the dividing line between which application should be the keeper of particular types of data.
I don't want to have to open my web browser to see if I've bookmarked a URI that somebody mentioned in an IRC channel. I also don't want to have to open my PIM to find the phone number of somebody who I'm talking to in that IRC channel.
These are the sorts of data access issues I'd like to see resolved, and I do see RDF as a possible, even attractive, approach to solving the problem. However, as you've pointed out, we can't simply modify our applications to all spit out RDF, and expect everything to fall into place. Some degree of consensus about how to represent data is required. Rather than writing new applications like Haystack, or looking for new approaches to managing one's information, I'd rather see efforts to modify existing applications to share data sources more effectively.
...Is truly a lost art.
Of course, we already knew this.
This would be an approach strikingly similar to that in the Advogato trust metric.
But I have a hard time coming up with things that we've discovered because a person actually went along to accompany an experiment.
I suppose it's simplistic, but what about experiments that look for answers about humans? For example, research into the effects of zero gravity on the body and ways to combat it.
Of course, research into keeping humans healthy in space is only beneficial if you believe that we should explore space at all. But if someone doesn't believe we should explore space at all, I see little point in discussing the space program at all with them. All I'm left with is this nagging feeling that they wouldn't have considered colonization of the Americas to be worth the trouble.
Another project I'd like to cite is the Hubble, which, while not necessarily an endeavor requiring humans to deploy it, did require humans to fix the thing. I'm certain that without a manned space program, the Hubble would've been launched, declared broken, and promptly abandoned. Why? Well, I think they would've deemed the cost involved in developing some sort of robotic repair crew to be prohibitive. Easier to just ditch it and try again.
Do you have JS disabled? The check is being done in JS, so turning it off will allow non-IE users in. Of course, if you were interested in the truth rather than just assuming the parent was making it up, you could've done a simple check of the page source/headers for signs of redirection.
It's right there in the <head>Not the first site to be dumb enough to shut out the non-IE/Win crowd, and it won't be the last either. Hell, even MSN's tried it.
It may not be a crime, but it may also not be realistic.
There is a remarkably arrogant attitude here in the US that we Americans are born with a soverign right to get paid more than someone with equivilant skills in other countries, and the coming years are going to give a lot of Americans expecting to live better than their foreign counterparts a serious moment of pause.
IBM needs programmers. They can hire one American, or three people in another country. To a business, it's a no brainer. Sensible economics. Will it have a downard effect on the standard of living in the US? Yes, probably. Maybe we're due (or overdue) for that to happen.
At my font size, the first line of the Mozilla Firebird product box ends up reading:
:)
"Mozilla Firebird 0.6 - A Lean, Mean Bugzilla Browsing Machine"
I read straight over the border, possibly because there was only 1px of space between 'Mean' and the border. Maybe Bugzilla should go down below firebird instead of next to it.
Not to say that Firebird doesn't do an excellent job of rendering and navigating Bugzilla...
To change the license you must also have the permission of everyone who is using the software. Once you have released something to the public domain there is no change you can take it out, it is just nonsense.
Correct. Once Application X 1.0 is released under the GPL, the author(s) cannot change that.
The maker of a software has no "unilateral" right to change the license once the program has been sold or distributed (unless the license explictly allows that I guess).
Incorrect. Just because Application X 1.0 was released under the GPL does not bind the author(s) to using the GPL for 2.0. If you'd re-read my original post, you'll see I already addressed this, by pointing out that a license cannot be retroactively changed.
Remember that anyone can make changes to GPL:d program so it is simply impossible to get a permission from everyone that has changed the source in any way.
Incorrect. Until a given user's changes to Application X are accepted by the author(s), that user has no claim to Application X. Now, that user is free to redistribute Application X with his changes, and call it Application Y, provided he do so under the GPL, or a compatible license.
My point exactly. If I had originally created Application X and licensed it under the GPL, accepted patches from people who understood the application was GPL, then I can no longer close source my application.
You can, actually, and many projects have done exactly that (Although usually they just change the license, rather than close the source). You simply need the consent of everybody who can make a legit claim to part of the source. Of course, gathering up all that approval isn't always easy. See, for example, the rather large Mozilla Relicensing FAQ
What you can't do is retroactively close the source of an app. So while you could take Application X, currently under the GPL, and make future versions closed, the GPL'd versions wouldn't be covered. This allows other people to continue working on the GPL version.
ok, this is one retailer, one that, quite frankly, not too many people use for their software needs
Always the best way to test out a new idea; a small segment of the market where it won't raise too many eyebrows. (See the introduction of DRM by record labels into CD's that savvy consumers would never buy, as a testing ground) That being said, as it's been pointed out in other comments, this was a decision by Office Depot. Of course, that doesn't mean it wasn't a decision encouraged by MS. I wouldn't put it past them at all to recommend the idea to other, more significant vendors.
if this "drm" "secure computing" bullshit continues, which i very very seriously doubt it will, many people will make the switch to mac os, or linux
Yes, let's put our faith in the wisdom of the consumers to think about the implications of the technology they probably won't even realize is being introduced. Because, after all, we all know how well consumers see through clever ad campaigns and shiny boxes.
Yep, we're safe. Enough of the Windows userbase will switch OS's when DRM becomes common that it won't be a problem. Everything will be just fine.
On second thought.. Consumers are hapless sheep. Let's NOT trust their intelligence, and instead be proactive about combating a danger (DRM) that 99% of the market won't see coming, and won't understand when it gets here.
Actually, when compared with what a simple CSS and DOM modification can do to make a smallscreen version of a page (As demonstrated here), Opera's method stops looking all that impressive.
As the AC mentioned, the grippers to collapse toolbars were removed for usability reasons. The details, if you really want to know (or just skim) are chronicled in several bug reports. Here's one of them.
Actually, IE6 does a decent job. Their DOM1 support is good, their CSS1 is more or less complete, but their CSS2 is pretty crappy. Fixed positioning doesn't work, selectors like E[attr] are missing, etc.
Lately I've been working on an app for a company's internal use, which means the delightful situation of being able to dictate minimum browser requirements. As a result, the app is designed for IE6/Mozilla. All development has been in Mozilla, and a lot of DOM use goes on. And it all works in IE6, no browser checking anywhere. My only regrets is I can't make use of the more advanced selectors provided by CSS2, so the HTML has a few more class attributes than it would need otherwise. But, overall, not bad.
Another positive note, IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml. So at last, XHTML documents can be sent with the proper mime type.
So despite being a Mozilla (Galeon) user, as a web developer who makes heavy use of modern standards, I look forward to seeing IE continue to catch up to Mozilla so that I can worry even less about browser-specific issues.
Aside: I have no idea why he'd be using Explorer to code Javascript, anyway, since that browser gives very little feedback when you have bugs in your scripts. Mozilla's DOM Inspector and Javascript console are some of the very best tools *any* javascript hacker ever got. They give very helpful feedback, are easy to use, and make development a thousand times easier.
I can't agree with you more. The DOM inspector flat out kicks ass. Never before has there been a tool as useful for digging into the structure of a document to figure out what's going on (Or maybe,w hat's going wrong)
There's also a lot to be said for opening up that JS console and running commands to manipulate the document you're looking at, without having to bother saving to a script. The JS console definitely leaves IE in the dust when it comes to handling JS errors. (IE's idea of a JS error is 'object does not contain that property')
What you're looking for is over here.
Of course, it's a proprietary solution. A much better option is to implement a similar editing tool in JS/DOM that works in both Moz and IE6+ (Maybe Opera 7 if it actually includes some respectable DOM support)
What exactly is a "Mozilla certificate"?
n dards
SSL certificates are quite standardized, and Mozilla supports several versions of that standard.
http://mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/psm/#sta
He also complained about Mozilla's vaunted "standards compliance." His exact words: "Mozilla invents its own standards, and it's the only one to comply to them."
For the most part, this is only true if your friend believes that the W3 is a subsidiary of AOL. Needless to say, it isn't, and in fact many of the standards which Mozilla follows (While IE only sorta follows) were written by groups that included representatives from Microsoft. A partial list of the (real, non-Mozilla invented) standards that Mozilla enforces can be found here.
Isn't javascript "write once, run anyware" kinda stuff?
It'd be nice, wouldn't it.
JavaScript is a Netscape invention, always has been. As such, Netscape did write its own standard and is the only one to comply with it. However, there IS a real standard known as ECMAScript that Moz and IE both do a reasonably good job of supporting. Unfortunately, this does not cover everything. ECMAScript can be thought of as defining the 'core' of what scripting on browsers is often used for.
Beyond the core are the areas of scripting that make up the buzzword-compliant DHTML (Dynamic HTML, a fancy way of saying JS, CSS, and HTML)
This is where cross-browser scripting gets hairy. The standards used for manipulating documents dynamically are collectively defined by the W3 as the DOM, or Document Object Model, which has many uses outside of HTML, but we'll stick to its HTML uses for now. Unfortunately, some of the more advanced elements of the DOM are still in a drafting phase, and as such are not ready to be used as standards. Meanwhile, browsers implement support in their own ways, lacking any sort of rules to adhere to. It's my hope that as these drafts are finalized into W3 Recommendations, that MS will include support for them as I know Mozilla will. Until then, browser detection will continue being a way of life for advanced client side scripting.
if you enable 'ask for cookie permission' then you get a XUL dialog popped up etc.. its still not perfect as we would like.
I don't know what parallel dimension you downloaded galeon from, but when I get a cookie prompt, it comes to me in a GTK dialog.
Additionally, the widgets used by gecko for rendering forms are native, and Mozilla can be configured to use a number of different toolkits for them.
One XUL dialog that is still in galeon, however, is the 'accept SSL certificate' dialog, so yes, galeon doesn't have a replacement for everything.
How many webserver administrators have the skills to look at the Apache sourcecode (or in this case, the OpenSSL sourcecode), find the bug, and fix it?
All the skill it should take is to apt-get upgrade or up2date, or whatever the distro in question uses for updates. Debian woody had the patch posted immediately. So the skills needed to update your Apache system are no different from those needed to patch code red (Which, a year after its creation, is still roaming around)
The often tauted ability to "go in and fix things" or even to simply "contribute" is highly overrated. Who found and fixed this bug? Was it some random user, or one of the original developers?
Well, judging by the advisory from the OpenSSL team (Dated July 30, btw, this is hardly a new issue) and a cursory glance over the developer list, the advisory issue was not found by anyone on the development team. So, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you. I consider the ability of users to find and patch security vulnerabilities to be a benefit of free software that simply cannot be overstated.
Having said that, I'll concede the obvious. Most end users are not skilled in the ways of finding or fixing bugs. However, there are zero end users of proprietary tools who even have the option of patching security holes in the software upon which they depend.
So, while some may say "But any user can find/fix security holes when it's free software!" I'll simply say "But any user has the freedom to find/fix security holes when it's free software!" Whether or not the user has the skills is irrelevant, what's important is that the option is there.
I want to see more episodes of Burke's "Connections".
Hell yeah. I'd never even heard of Connections until I got cable and saw it on Discover Science. Awesome stuff, history filled to the brim with fascinating trivia. You'll never hear about this stuff in your history classes.
Burke was rumored to have done some speaking here in Portland recently, but I missed it. Want to see him speak, along with Spalding Gray.
but WinForms and ADO are the only things not submitted to ECMA
.NET framework has been submitted.
I've mentioned this before, but I'm always happy to squelch misinformation, so I'll repeat. The only things that have been submitted to the ECMA are C# and the CLI. The rest is not. Let me say that again. No part of the
Right, AOL isn't developing Mozilla the browser, AOL is developing Mozilla the application development framework.
So much time has been invested in making Mozilla into such a framework that it would be naive to think AOL just wants a good browser to replace IE with. There are much more interesting, and far more elaborate uses for Mozilla that AOL can use in its fight against MS.
Debian 3.0 Woody comes with KDE 2 and XFree86 4.1 while 3 and 4.2 are out respectively. This is a bit sad, seeing that even CygWin and FreeBSD have more up-to-date versions in their releases.
Release processes do take time, and Debian woody's started long before KDE3 or XFree86 4.2 were released. It is not the policy of the Debian team to drop everything mid-release-prep and package the latest version of some package, regardless of how significant it may be. If that was the case, releases would take a great deal more time.
If you want to see the process go faster, feel free to step up and help out.
Still, sad that people have to copy-and-paste articles word-for-word :-(
Ah, well then my appoligies. It is a pretty sad state of affairs when one feels compelled to post on Slashdot so badly, yet can't think of anything intelligent to say, and proceeds to steal someone else's thoughts.
I'm also disappointed to see people like you are still supporting Levin as I have seen him insult and hurt the feelings of innocent developers trying to use "OPN for what it is intended for" for no apparent reason. The abuse of power can't just be shrugged off; the issue must be addressed -- and the best way of doing so is by providing a community-driven alternative.
Interesting that since I didn't outright slam Rob in my post, you assume that I support his actions.
Regardless, I do not see how one can assert that OPN is not community driven, considering the thousands of people that regularly sign on. As a long time regular in a handful of channels, I feel fairly confident saying there is indeed a strong community there, and that I am a part of it.
Frankly, I consider starting an alternate network over the behavior of one staffer to be a foolish waste of the resources that have been invested in OPN by countless individuals who are not Rob Levin. It seems to me a far more prudent solution would be to have him step down, rather than to encourage an exodous from a perfectly good network.
But then, according to the Open Source naysayers, it's a standard Open Source tactic to fork a project rather than contribute to fixing it.
You have every right to disagree with Rob Levin's behavior. Lots of people do. But how does this have anything to do with the decision to use OPN for what it is intended for?
If you consider it a successful forum for Open Source developers, and you have nothing but respect for the other staffers, I don't understand why there is cause to discourage the use of OPN.