There is no copy-protection standard for digital media that is failproof. Its physically impossible. You can come close, but never totally reach full protection.
- Person A encrypts the data and sends it to person B. - Person B decrypts the data using hardware or software provided by person A.
All person B has to do is investigate the hardware and figure out how it works.
AFAIK, Encrypted data depends on the mechanisms used to decrypt the data being kept away from someone trying to break into it. If you are distributing the means of breaking in, there is nothing you can do. If you have every played with public key encryption, you will realize that if your private key gets out, you are in trouble.
Are the people designing the encryption so intelligent that by breaking down the devices into pieces (even photons or atoms) trying to get at the data won't be affective? I think not! The question is, can they come up with a clever technique no one can figure out? To put this in perspective: think about Americans using the navajo's language during WWII. Now, think about the protected media device being a hiding place, and the decryption mechanism being (the navajo) is at that location. All you have to do is break into that hiding place and capture the navajo indian and force him to decode the message for you. And resistance (i.e. the navajo not giving any info) won't be possible in this case sense an electronic device isn't sentient. Unless they designed the device to self-destruct if opened. Yikes!
Anyway, when you play a high-definition movie, you can always tap into the video data going to the tv unless they encrypt that too (which I'm not sure of, but assume not). If that's the case, you can copy the entire video. You might not get the menus, but who cares if you only want the movie?
Of course, if the decryption mechanisms are so advanced that it would take millions of dollars to research how they work, it might buy them some time.
'JVC persuaded Fox, Universal, DreamWorks and Artisan to support the format after developing a new copy-protection standard it calls D-Theater to prevent unauthorized copying of the high-definition movies'
That really bugs me. People should be able to make personal copies.
When I was in highschool, we used to play games during free periods and after school on the network and we had a lot of fun. Eventually, they started banning games on school computers because they felt the computers should be used for academic reasons and didn't like having games installed. I feel, that in moderation, gaming should be allowed at school as long as its at a reasonable time.
Look at it this way: If you allow gaming once in a while, they won't view your rules as hardball. Even students need some time to unwind, and (at least back when I was a highschool student) the only place you could play multiplayer networked games was in school because that was the only place the connection was good enough.
I don't see how it can hurt. You aren't running a prison camp;-)
Correct (kinda), but if percieve it - it exists. Is the perception of any other higher dimensional being that doesn't percieve time more correct than ours? No, its just a different perception where everything is relative except for one thing...
AFAIK, talkback doesn't require any debug code. It returns stack traces and memory locations of errors and other information that is used to find what caused the error on the other end, yet not bloat the code.
Here is some information on Netscape quality feedback agent (talkback):
"Quality Feedback Agent - a small piece of software embedded in Netscape Communicator 4.5 - gathers data about what is happening in Communicator whenever it crashes. Although end users may not be able to decipher this information, it will be tremendously helpful to Netscape engineers, enabling them to quickly isolate the cause of a crash and then correct it. The Quality Feedback Agent makes it easy for end users to participate in the quality improvement process at Netscape, and helps Netscape identify problems more readily."
After long last, its finally here. Don't think that this is the end of Mozilla. It's only the beginning! Netscape 7.0 is most likely coming off the 1.0 branch, and the trunk has already been getting bugfixes that will go into later Mozilla releases (releases). So, if a fix to a bug you wanted fixed isn't in Mozilla 1.0, its not the end of the world. Stay posted.:-)
I like the idea of bringing down the overhead of binary messages. With probably over 100GB? per day of binaries on all the newsgroups, this probably means a drastic 40GB reduction (albeit probably temporary as Jeremy Nixon mentioned) which means a lot of saved bandwidth on servers and also faster downloads for end users our favorite digital media (whatever that may be;-). I feel this is a good start - though maybe a little rushed. I have to thank Jürgen for bringing the inefficiencies of MIME to the forefront of discussion even though he might have created a little extra work for developers. I also agree with Jeremy that yEnc should be stamped out in place of moving this into MIME.
I would first like to say: From the involvement I have seen from Jeremy with Usenet (especially news.software.nntp) and nntp software, I would be insane to say that I know more than or even close to what he knows. In fact, I work on the browser portion of Mozilla (as a volunteer) and know little about the underlying code of the Mail-News portion (nor do I even use it because its still very beta, and doesn't do what I need from a Usenet client). I am also not very knowledgeable on the deep-down guts of Usenet. I am a regular user of Usenet though, and have a little knowledge about how the news system works, so I feel that gives me a right to talk about yEnc from a more general standpoint than one possible from someone with Jeremy's experience. But I've decided to start expanding my experience into Mail-News and I'm thinking about implementing yEnc for Mozilla (even though I have a million other projects I'm working on).
>Unfortunately, with the discussions being fragmented in many newsgroups, the people >who will ultimately determine the acceptance (or non-acceptance) of yEnc -- the end- >users -- are largely unaware of the issues and problems raised by this situation.
I respectfully disagree that it is the end-user's decision.It is developers' decisions whether or not it becomes popular. Otherwise, we will have people continue to "spam" the groups with yEnc messages supported by only a couple clients. The people that have those clients will be happy and continue to post in that format, leaving out the people using other clients from those postings. This will never end, and the only solution is that everyone switch to the same client, ignore the postings as much as possible, or quality clients (which hopefully will one day include Mozilla Mail-News) support yEnc (at least on a read basis) so that no one will be left out of yEnc. It almost seems like developers have no choice now if they want to stay competitive in the Usenet arena. Good or bad? I think good in the long run, although it is currently a headache for developers.
>My objection to yEnc is because it was done poorly, not because it was done by >Jürgen, and I certainly have nothing against him. Had he done it right, I would be >thanking him right now.
I agree that yEnc seems like a wimp compared to MIME. Of course, this isn't the end of the world and I think it might be a good impetus to whip some people into action. I imagine that Jeremy, with his experience, Jürgen, and others can get together and majorly revamp the MIME standard, throwing out 7-bit encoding, including every new technology that has been thought of since its inception, making it easily identifiable as something separate from the old standard, and renaming it.
> And the bandwidth savings? That's an illusion. A smaller encoding scheme gives > us exactly one benefit: faster downloads and uploads for the users. It is not going > to make Usenet smaller. It is not going to allow servers to increase retention. Do > you really think people aren't going to post more, if they can do it faster? Of > course they are. They're always going to post more, with or without yEnc. And, > with yEnc, they are even more likely to post more, because posting the same > amount of material will take a shorter time, and because people who can't use > yEnc will ask for reposts in uuencode. [I actually see this happening]
> The growth of Usenet volume is more or less exponential, and has been for quite some > time. So let's just say I'm wrong > about people and they really will post less. Let's say > that, overnight, all of the binaries on Usenet start getting posted in yEnc, and people > post exactly the same amount they would have posted with uuencode, resulting in less > total volume. All you have done, in that far-fetched scenario, is create a one-time > volume savings. Usenet will continue to grow at the same rate it has been growing, and > after a few months, it will be just as large as it was before. And it will get bigger from > there. So all you have done is moved the graph back by a few months. Big deal.
Personally, I think that Usenet has gotten way too large to have all the newsgroups (or a large portion of them) on every server and needs to be redesigned (possibly with a more distributed system). That's another issue though.
> Programmers of Usenet software now have to implement yEnc in their code. > Not just once, either. The specification is, as I write this, up to version 1.3, and > there will be future revisions. So everyone has to go back and update their code > every time the spec is updated. And they don't just have to change it, they have to > continue to support the older spec as well, because updates to a new version won't > happen overnight. And because the spec is imprecise, programmers are forced to create > and maintain even more ugly [ Pretty:-) ] code in their software, when they could be > spending time making more worthwhile improvements. There is a good reason for > new standards to be discussed at length and incorporate feedback from experts - so > that you don't have to keep going back and fixing it. And, even when something better > comes along, all that yEnc code can't just go away; it will still be there, and still have to > be maintained. People won't stop using yEnc overnight. It would take years to become > uncommon.
I'm willing to waste a little of my time implementing it if it will stir some people into action. We need some kind of standard out there that can warrant the throwing away of every other encoding standard out there. Anyone willing to undertake such a project? If there is a standard that replaces all the current standards, I imagine that yEnc, UUEncode, Base64 would phase out over time. A more naive wish is there could be an industry-wide agreement to rip out all the other standards from their code, but I know the chances of that happening are slim.
Anyway, I say for Jeremy the old adage, "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself". Jeremy, why don't you organize a group to oversee the development of a new all-inclusive MIME standard? Is there any point to leaving the 7 bit aspects of MIME in there? Why aren't they ripped out (A question from someone who hasn't looked at the mime standard:)?
> Now, he seems to be planning to update the spec to include a means of using yEnc > with MIME, which is the way everyone has told him it should be done. But he says > he's going to do it within a few weeks! You can't add something to MIME in a few > weeks, and there are good reasons for that. So, in reality, what he may be planning to > do is bypass the standards process and simply publish a specification.
> There are two small problems (two that I have found, at least) with the MIME spec > which would need to be addressed before the creation of a yEnc transfer-encoding. > Why was MIME ignored for yEnc in the first place? Jürgen has said that MIME is > not suitable because not all newsreaders support it, or support it fully. Does this > make sense? You can't use MIME because it's not universally supported, so instead > you create something new which isn't supported by a single newsreader in existence?
It appears that things are moving too slowly for his liking. This makes me think of huge multinational corporations that just lumber along and don't get anything accomplished but arguing and fighting. This (along with squelching all competition) causes a slowdown in the growth of technology. I have no clue if that is the case with the MIME group, but it appears that Jürgen would like things to go a little faster. I definately agree with him on this, since I am getting sick of all the messed up multipart postings I see on Usenet, and if the new changes being proposed to MIME can fix that (MD5 checksums, etc), then I would like to see that implemented as soon as possible. Since I don't have the experience to do that and would rather not throw myself into yet another project, I hope people with experience can get the ball rolling. From my look at Google Groups, it seems that these things have been talked about for ages. Why can't we have a little less talk and a little more action? From my experience on the Mozilla project, I see that people can sit discussing something for years. Sometimes, it's better to take the bull by the horns and try to - even if it doesn't satisfy everybody - actually do something. For me, this means implementing something that has been talked about and discussed about forever because no one wants to (or has the time to) sit down and come up with a detailed proposal on how it should be accomplished.
> If you agree with me, what can you do to help? If you are the author of a > Usenet newsreader, you probably have to implement yEnc at least for decoding
Sounds like a very good idea. I will propose this for Mail-News.
I have been looking through the binary newsgroups (as I am a regular lurker on many groups) and have been seeing all the people moaning about yEnc, and I can't say I blame them, as I have been moaning silently, also. That's the main reason I am planning on implemting this for Mozilla. That would leave one other thing before I was willing to switch from Outlook Express: Multipart message decoding (Hopefully better than OE's wimpy support), for which I have written a lengthy preliminary spec but don't have time to implement myself - Multipart messages bug.
Being a Mozilla developer, I would like nothing more than to use Mozilla's own software for news, and I will be caught between a rock and a hard place if Mozilla supports yEnc and not multipart decoding, and Outlook Express supports multipart decoding and not yEnc (at least until people stop posting yEnc messages).
Balance is important, but stuff like this is useful. The point you have is not to spend your whole life in front of the computer. There is nothing wrong, though, with spending a lot of time at the computer. You also have to realize that a lot of people do this for a LIVING. Knowledge about what's going on in the tech world is part of staying alive in this business. Therefore, this is how THEY make their money instead of working at McDonalds. Balance is key, and you have to balance time on the computer with excersize, sleep, and time with friends / fun other than computers, possibley school and job, and possibly spirituality and/or religion. If you are letting one of those slip, then you are missing out on part of life. We live life for the experience of it. That is the key to life, getting the most experiences from it. In the world we are in now of fast-paced technology evolution (which I often wish would slow down a little, or become more orderly in growth), one experience that can be gained is being a part of it. The meaning of life is to gain experience and knowledge to help you on the other side. Therefore, everything that exists on this planet is something that can be experienced to gain knowledge and insight, and even though you might not agree with certain experiences or want to try them doesn't mean that there is anything wrong in doing so unless it causes pain or hurt for others as you are also hurting yourself in the process as we are all one. Of course, what is harmful for others can be left up for debate and argument. Try to be open minded before judging others.
With the recent builds including this build and recent nightlies I just tested on, printing works great for me. The page preview is nice and fast and the printing is accurate. Reading that reminded me I hadn't tried out the printing in a while and I am pleasantly surprised (I havn't been following printing bugs). I'm sure you will be surprised too.
I did notice a little problem with a repeat of part of the page on the right side of the print preview, but it didn't appear on a nightly I downloaded a few days ago, so its probably only something that was on the 0.9.8 branch. (Not sure though). This doesn't affect the print though for me.
It's highly possible - though you will notice in the past that when Mozilla started to slow its speed of releases, it bounced back.
A graph
This graph makes it look like its going to asymptote at 1.0, but I doubt its going to happen. It might go to a couple more minor revisions more than was planned at most or delay a little. Most likely, though, the slope will get steeper somewhere along the line... Most likely right after 1.0
I guess we will have to wait and see how things go. No one knows for sure.
How long did it take (a certain company) to come out with a quality browser? I wouldn't consider IE3 or 4 quality at all. How much as IE changed in the last few years? Developing a quality standards-compliant browsing platform takes time. Mozilla was almost written from scratch and is written with almost identical code on each platform.
Besides, IE is far from perfect - though I wouldn't argue its not a good browser. I've tested many things on IE for comparisons and found many ways to foul it up.
The following is provided for you're amusement - I wouldn't get too hung up over it.
Release dates of previous versions:
Mozilla 0.6 - Completed December 6, 2000
Mozilla 0.7 - Completed January 9, 2001
Mozilla 0.8 - Completed February 14, 2001
Mozilla 0.8.1 - Completed March 26, 2001
Mozilla 0.9 - Completed May 7, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.1 - Completed June 7, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.2 - Completed June 28, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.3 - Completed August 2, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.4 - Completed September 14, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.5 - Completed October 12, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.6 - Completed November 20, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.7 - Completed December 21, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.8 - Completed February 4, 2002
I took the release dates of Mozilla and made a list
of version numbers in number form, and months where
the length of each month is averaged to 30 days.
I graphed it and got what looks to be almost a logarithmic
curve (besides the large dip around month 4) with an asymptote
around 1.0 - Available at:
Graph Here I'll try to remember not to get rid of this image or move it.
What does this graph mean about the release date of Mozilla? I'll
let you draw you're own conclusions.FWIW, I wouldn't take the implications of the numbers
too seriously, but thought you might be interested.;-)
I like your enthusiasm, but making a quality piece of software takes time. There are many things on the list that developers want to accomplish before version 1.0, and features other people want to see. This is a big release for developers and for people involved in the project not only because its one dot zero, but because it has taken a lot of work to get here. So, its not just another release for us, even though it might seem like that to others. We, people who work on the Mozilla project - volunteers and staff, are hoping we can make it shine above all the rest of the releases.
The question is, do you want it to be a great release, or just some ordinary release? From your statement, it seems you want it to be special. If so, then why try to pressure us into releasing it too early? I realize you were joking, but there is a lot of pressure coming to freeze parts the code.
If we freeze too early, then people might not be happy with the way the code we freeze is laid out. If we freeze too late, we might anger a lot of people and also slow down development also because code changes too often. There has to be a balance that makes most people happy.
A lot of things are going on before the release of 1.0 including: increased modularization of the code, UI changes, functionality additions, build system enhancements, cleaning of the code, testing, feature additions, performance tuning, XUL/XPCOM etc documentation, stability improvements, and legal issues.
Some people want it to come out on time. Others want it held back until they are happy with it (including I). Some people have long lists of things they want finished and have to finish. Therefore, it is unrealistic to give any estimates on arrival time. All I can say is that we are going to try our best.
Create the favicon, but please also put the in your pages so that eventually browsers will stop searching for favicon.ico. Microsoft created this mess and hopefully it can be fixed. Also, by using the method, you can have different icons on different parts of your site. Unfortunately, "shortcut icon" (also started by Microsoft as a response to complaints about logs) is not proper use of the link tag. It is saying that this is both a shortcut and an icon.
Interesting... I recommend before you do anything else with your bookmarks that you go on the mozilla newsgroups or #mozillazine at irc.mozilla.org and see if anyone can help you figure out what happened.
Whoever moderated didn't get the joke. He (or she) meant Mozilla "the beast" was released as you can tell by his ASCII art. Whoever moderated this to redundant probably thought he was talking about the software being released.
I am a Mozilla developer, but I must give credit where credit is due. IE is a nice piece of software from a usability, appearance and stability standpoint. On the other hand, it is lacking in terms of standards compliance and number of features. I don't think its fair to attack the programmers for Microsoft because you don't like the company. They are just doing their job and following orders.
I talked to Asa on IRC, and what she means is that Mozilla is a testing ground for Mozilla technologies such as XPIDL, XUL, XPCOM, and standards-compliance, etc for use by web applications and development of other applications - long term testing. As I am a developer, I was talking more of short-term testing of bugfixes, regression testing, and other such things that might dissappear by the time the milestone is released.:-) This goes to show that people can have different definitions of the same thing.
Asa: If people want to test Mozilla, then it is much better if they download a nightly build. That is what I meant. The nightly builds are the most up-to-date. If you mean testing before Netscape branches, then I agree with what you are saying, but also remember that Mozilla has evolved much further than being just a testing-ground for Netscape (as I assume you realize since you are Mozilla staff:)
That article is old and out of date. Mozilla milestones are meant to be stable releases that can be used as a personal browser. They are also for testing purposes, but not so much as the nightly binaries.
I don't understand why he wants it to be slowed down, though. He doesn't have to download every milestone release that comes out.
I download Mozilla binaries about once a week, rebuild my source tree entirely once a week, and pull and build portions of the tree every day, so a month seems like a very long time to go between versions. Its all relative.
Therefore, if he wants to see a release schedule like Microsoft's, he can just download ever.1 versions or so.
If he thinks we should make releases less often and spend more time testing, he might have a valid point, but he should realize that Mozilla changes so much in a month it merits a new release.
Slashdot Mirror
That's it! I'm moving to Canada.
There is no copy-protection standard for digital media that is failproof. Its physically impossible. You can come close, but never totally reach full protection.
- Person A encrypts the data and sends it to person B.
- Person B decrypts the data using hardware or software provided by person A.
All person B has to do is investigate the hardware and figure out how it works.
AFAIK, Encrypted data depends on the mechanisms used to decrypt the data being kept away from someone trying to break into it. If you are distributing the means of breaking in, there is nothing you can do. If you have every played with public key encryption, you will realize that if your private key gets out, you are in trouble.
Are the people designing the encryption so intelligent that by breaking down the devices into pieces (even photons or atoms) trying to get at the data won't be affective? I think not! The question is, can they come up with a clever technique no one can figure out? To put this in perspective: think about Americans using the navajo's language during WWII. Now, think about the protected media device being a hiding place, and the decryption mechanism being (the navajo) is at that location. All you have to do is break into that hiding place and capture the navajo indian and force him to decode the message for you. And resistance (i.e. the navajo not giving any info) won't be possible in this case sense an electronic device isn't sentient. Unless they designed the device to self-destruct if opened. Yikes!
Anyway, when you play a high-definition movie, you can always tap into the video data going to the tv unless they encrypt that too (which I'm not sure of, but assume not). If that's the case, you can copy the entire video. You might not get the menus, but who cares if you only want the movie?
Of course, if the decryption mechanisms are so advanced that it would take millions of dollars to research how they work, it might buy them some time.
'JVC persuaded Fox, Universal, DreamWorks and Artisan to support the format after developing a new copy-protection standard it calls D-Theater to prevent unauthorized copying of the high-definition movies'
That really bugs me. People should be able to make personal copies.
When I was in highschool, we used to play games during free periods and after school on the network and we had a lot of fun. Eventually, they started banning games on school computers because they felt the computers should be used for academic reasons and didn't like having games installed. I feel, that in moderation, gaming should be allowed at school as long as its at a reasonable time.
;-)
Look at it this way: If you allow gaming once in a while, they won't view your rules as hardball. Even students need some time to unwind, and (at least back when I was a highschool student) the only place you could play multiplayer networked games was in school because that was the only place the connection was good enough.
I don't see how it can hurt. You aren't running a prison camp
Correct (kinda), but if percieve it - it exists. Is the perception of any other higher dimensional being that doesn't percieve time more correct than ours? No, its just a different perception where everything is relative except for one thing...
http://wp.netscape.com/communicator/navigator/v4.5 / fs1.html
AFAIK, talkback doesn't require any debug code. It returns stack traces and memory locations of errors and other information that is used to find what caused the error on the other end, yet not bloat the code.
Here is some information on Netscape quality feedback agent (talkback):
"Quality Feedback Agent - a small piece of software embedded in Netscape Communicator 4.5 - gathers data about what is happening in Communicator whenever it crashes. Although end users may not be able to decipher this information, it will be tremendously helpful to Netscape engineers, enabling them to quickly isolate the cause of a crash and then correct it. The Quality Feedback Agent makes it easy for end users to participate in the quality improvement process at Netscape, and helps Netscape identify problems more readily."
Some of the servers had to reboot. They should be OK now. That is, unless they get really bogged down (which usually happens on a release).
At a minor release a month, most likely a year at the minimum until 2.0 comes out.
After long last, its finally here. Don't think that this is the end of Mozilla. It's only the beginning! Netscape 7.0 is most likely coming off the 1.0 branch, and the trunk has already been getting bugfixes that will go into later Mozilla releases (releases). So, if a fix to a bug you wanted fixed isn't in Mozilla 1.0, its not the end of the world. Stay posted. :-)
I am posting this on Slashdot under the yEnc Article, news.software.nntp, and also will CC it to both Jeremy Nixon and also Jürgen Helbing
;-). I feel this is a good start - though maybe a little rushed. I have to thank Jürgen for bringing the inefficiencies of MIME to the forefront of discussion even though he might have created a little extra work for developers. I also agree with Jeremy that yEnc should be stamped out in place of moving this into MIME.
:-) ] code in their software, when they could be
:)?
I like the idea of bringing down the overhead of binary messages. With probably over 100GB? per day of binaries on all the newsgroups, this probably means a drastic 40GB reduction (albeit probably temporary as Jeremy Nixon mentioned) which means a lot of saved bandwidth on servers and also faster downloads for end users our favorite digital media (whatever that may be
I would first like to say: From the involvement I have seen from Jeremy with Usenet (especially news.software.nntp) and nntp software, I would be insane to say that I know more than or even close to what he knows. In fact, I work on the browser portion of Mozilla (as a volunteer) and know little about the underlying code of the Mail-News portion (nor do I even use it because its still very beta, and doesn't do what I need from a Usenet client). I am also not very knowledgeable on the deep-down guts of Usenet. I am a regular user of Usenet though, and have a little knowledge about how the news system works, so I feel that gives me a right to talk about yEnc from a more general standpoint than one possible from someone with Jeremy's experience. But I've decided to start expanding my experience into Mail-News and I'm thinking about implementing yEnc for Mozilla (even though I have a million other projects I'm working on).
From Jeremy's article:
>Unfortunately, with the discussions being fragmented in many newsgroups, the people
>who will ultimately determine the acceptance (or non-acceptance) of yEnc -- the end-
>users -- are largely unaware of the issues and problems raised by this situation.
I respectfully disagree that it is the end-user's decision.It is developers' decisions whether or not it becomes popular. Otherwise, we will have people continue to "spam" the groups with yEnc messages supported by only a couple clients. The people that have those clients will be happy and continue to post in that format, leaving out the people using other clients from those postings. This will never end, and the only solution is that everyone switch to the same client, ignore the postings as much as possible, or quality clients (which hopefully will one day include Mozilla Mail-News) support yEnc (at least on a read basis) so that no one will be left out of yEnc. It almost seems like developers have no choice now if they want to stay competitive in the Usenet arena. Good or bad? I think good in the long run, although it is currently a headache for developers.
>My objection to yEnc is because it was done poorly, not because it was done by
>Jürgen, and I certainly have nothing against him. Had he done it right, I would be
>thanking him right now.
I agree that yEnc seems like a wimp compared to MIME. Of course, this isn't the end of the world and I think it might be a good impetus to whip some people into action. I imagine that Jeremy, with his experience, Jürgen, and others can get together and majorly revamp the MIME standard, throwing out 7-bit encoding, including every new technology that has been thought of since its inception, making it easily identifiable as something separate from the old standard, and renaming it.
> And the bandwidth savings? That's an illusion. A smaller encoding scheme gives
> us exactly one benefit: faster downloads and uploads for the users. It is not going
> to make Usenet smaller. It is not going to allow servers to increase retention. Do
> you really think people aren't going to post more, if they can do it faster? Of
> course they are. They're always going to post more, with or without yEnc. And,
> with yEnc, they are even more likely to post more, because posting the same
> amount of material will take a shorter time, and because people who can't use
> yEnc will ask for reposts in uuencode. [I actually see this happening]
> The growth of Usenet volume is more or less exponential, and has been for quite some
> time. So let's just say I'm wrong > about people and they really will post less. Let's say
> that, overnight, all of the binaries on Usenet start getting posted in yEnc, and people
> post exactly the same amount they would have posted with uuencode, resulting in less
> total volume. All you have done, in that far-fetched scenario, is create a one-time
> volume savings. Usenet will continue to grow at the same rate it has been growing, and
> after a few months, it will be just as large as it was before. And it will get bigger from
> there. So all you have done is moved the graph back by a few months. Big deal.
Personally, I think that Usenet has gotten way too large to have all the newsgroups (or a large portion of them) on every server and needs to be redesigned (possibly with a more distributed system). That's another issue though.
> Programmers of Usenet software now have to implement yEnc in their code.
> Not just once, either. The specification is, as I write this, up to version 1.3, and
> there will be future revisions. So everyone has to go back and update their code
> every time the spec is updated. And they don't just have to change it, they have to
> continue to support the older spec as well, because updates to a new version won't
> happen overnight. And because the spec is imprecise, programmers are forced to create
> and maintain even more ugly [ Pretty
> spending time making more worthwhile improvements. There is a good reason for
> new standards to be discussed at length and incorporate feedback from experts - so
> that you don't have to keep going back and fixing it. And, even when something better
> comes along, all that yEnc code can't just go away; it will still be there, and still have to
> be maintained. People won't stop using yEnc overnight. It would take years to become
> uncommon.
I'm willing to waste a little of my time implementing it if it will stir some people into action. We need some kind of standard out there that can warrant the throwing away of every other encoding standard out there.
Anyone willing to undertake such a project? If there is a standard that replaces all the current standards, I imagine that yEnc, UUEncode, Base64 would phase out over time. A more naive wish is there could be an industry-wide
agreement to rip out all the other standards from their code, but I know the chances of that happening are slim.
Anyway, I say for Jeremy the old adage, "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself". Jeremy, why don't you organize a group to oversee the development of a new all-inclusive MIME
standard? Is there any point to leaving the 7 bit aspects of MIME in there? Why aren't they ripped out (A question from someone who hasn't looked at the mime standard
> Now, he seems to be planning to update the spec to include a means of using yEnc
> with MIME, which is the way everyone has told him it should be done. But he says
> he's going to do it within a few weeks! You can't add something to MIME in a few
> weeks, and there are good reasons for that. So, in reality, what he may be planning to
> do is bypass the standards process and simply publish a specification.
> There are two small problems (two that I have found, at least) with the MIME spec
> which would need to be addressed before the creation of a yEnc transfer-encoding.
> Why was MIME ignored for yEnc in the first place? Jürgen has said that MIME is
> not suitable because not all newsreaders support it, or support it fully. Does this
> make sense? You can't use MIME because it's not universally supported, so instead
> you create something new which isn't supported by a single newsreader in existence?
It appears that things are moving too slowly for his liking. This makes me think of huge multinational corporations that just lumber along and don't get anything accomplished but arguing and fighting. This (along with squelching
all competition) causes a slowdown in the growth of technology. I have no clue if that is the case with the MIME group, but it appears that Jürgen would like things to go a little faster. I definately agree with him on this, since I am
getting sick of all the messed up multipart postings I see on Usenet, and if the new changes being proposed to MIME can fix that (MD5 checksums, etc), then I would like to see that implemented as soon as possible. Since I don't have
the experience to do that and would rather not throw myself into yet another project, I hope people with experience can get the ball rolling. From my look at Google Groups, it seems that these things have been talked about for ages.
Why can't we have a little less talk and a little more action? From my experience on the Mozilla project, I see that people can sit discussing something for years. Sometimes, it's better to take the bull by the horns and try to - even
if it doesn't satisfy everybody - actually do something. For me, this means implementing something that has been talked about and discussed about forever because no one wants to (or has the time to) sit down and come up with a detailed proposal on how it should be accomplished.
> If you agree with me, what can you do to help? If you are the author of a
> Usenet newsreader, you probably have to implement yEnc at least for decoding
Sounds like a very good idea. I will propose this for Mail-News.
yEnc bug on bugzilla.mozilla.org
I have been looking through the binary newsgroups (as I am a regular lurker on many groups) and have been seeing all the people moaning about yEnc, and I can't say I blame them, as I have been moaning silently, also. That's the main reason I am planning on implemting this for Mozilla. That would leave one other thing before I was willing to switch from Outlook Express: Multipart message decoding (Hopefully better than OE's wimpy support), for which I have written a lengthy preliminary spec but don't have time to implement myself - Multipart messages bug.
Being a Mozilla developer, I would like nothing more than to use Mozilla's own software for news, and I will be caught between a rock and a hard place if Mozilla supports yEnc and not multipart decoding, and Outlook Express
supports multipart decoding and not yEnc (at least until people stop posting yEnc messages).
Balance is important, but stuff like this is useful. The point you have is not to spend your whole life in front of the computer. There is nothing wrong, though, with spending a lot of time at the computer. You also have to realize that a lot of people do this for a LIVING. Knowledge about what's going on in the tech world is part of staying alive in this business. Therefore, this is how THEY make their money instead of working at McDonalds.
Balance is key, and you have to balance time on the computer with excersize, sleep, and time with friends / fun other than computers, possibley school and job, and possibly spirituality and/or religion. If you are letting one of those slip, then you are missing out on part of life.
We live life for the experience of it. That is the key to life, getting the most experiences from it. In the world we are in now of fast-paced technology evolution (which I often wish would slow down a little, or become more orderly in growth), one experience that can be gained is being a part of it.
The meaning of life is to gain experience and knowledge to help you on the other side. Therefore, everything that exists on this planet is something that can be experienced to gain knowledge and insight, and even though you might not agree with certain experiences or want to try them doesn't mean that there is anything wrong in doing so unless it causes pain or hurt for others as you are also hurting yourself in the process as we are all one. Of course, what is harmful for others can be left up for debate and argument.
Try to be open minded before judging others.
With the recent builds including this build and recent nightlies I just tested on, printing works great for me. The page preview is nice and fast and the printing is accurate. Reading that reminded me I hadn't tried out the printing in a while and I am pleasantly surprised (I havn't been following printing bugs). I'm sure you will be surprised too.
I did notice a little problem with a repeat of part of the page on the right side of the print preview, but it didn't appear on a nightly I downloaded a few days ago, so its probably only something that was on the 0.9.8 branch. (Not sure though). This doesn't affect the print though for me.
The graph
Posted that in IE and no link showed up <grins>
It's highly possible - though you will notice in the past that when Mozilla started to slow its speed of releases, it bounced back.
A graph
This graph makes it look like its going to asymptote at 1.0, but I doubt its going to happen. It might go to a couple more minor revisions more than was planned at most or delay a little. Most likely, though, the slope will get steeper somewhere along the line... Most likely right after 1.0
I guess we will have to wait and see how things go. No one knows for sure.
How long did it take (a certain company) to come out with a quality browser? I wouldn't consider IE3 or 4 quality at all. How much as IE changed in the last few years? Developing a quality standards-compliant browsing platform takes time. Mozilla was almost written from scratch and is written with almost identical code on each platform.
Besides, IE is far from perfect - though I wouldn't argue its not a good browser. I've tested many things on IE for comparisons and found many ways to foul it up.
The following is provided for you're amusement - I wouldn't get too hung up over it.
;-)
Release dates of previous versions:
Mozilla 0.6 - Completed December 6, 2000
Mozilla 0.7 - Completed January 9, 2001
Mozilla 0.8 - Completed February 14, 2001
Mozilla 0.8.1 - Completed March 26, 2001
Mozilla 0.9 - Completed May 7, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.1 - Completed June 7, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.2 - Completed June 28, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.3 - Completed August 2, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.4 - Completed September 14, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.5 - Completed October 12, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.6 - Completed November 20, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.7 - Completed December 21, 2001
Mozilla 0.9.8 - Completed February 4, 2002
I took the release dates of Mozilla and made a list
of version numbers in number form, and months where
the length of each month is averaged to 30 days.
Mth Ver
0.2 0.6
1.3 0.7
2.5 0.8
3.9 0.81
5.2 0.9
6.2 0.91
6.9 0.92
8.2 0.93
8.5 0.94
10.5 0.95
11.6 0.96
12.8 0.97
14.1 0.98
I graphed it and got what looks to be almost a logarithmic
curve (besides the large dip around month 4) with an asymptote
around 1.0 - Available at:
Graph Here
I'll try to remember not to get rid of this image or move it.
What does this graph mean about the release date of Mozilla? I'll
let you draw you're own conclusions.FWIW, I wouldn't take the implications of the numbers
too seriously, but thought you might be interested.
I like your enthusiasm, but making a quality piece of software takes time. There are many things on the list that developers want to accomplish before version 1.0, and features other people want to see. This is a big release for developers and for people involved in the project not only because its one dot zero, but because it has taken a lot of work to get here. So, its not just another release for us, even though it might seem like that to others. We, people who work on the Mozilla project - volunteers and staff, are hoping we can make it shine above all the rest of the releases.
The question is, do you want it to be a great release, or just some ordinary release? From your statement, it seems you want it to be special. If so, then why try to pressure us into releasing it too early? I realize you were joking, but there is a lot of pressure coming to freeze parts the code.
If we freeze too early, then people might not be happy with the way the code we freeze is laid out. If we freeze too late, we might anger a lot of people and also slow down development also because code changes too often. There has to be a balance that makes most people happy.
A lot of things are going on before the release of 1.0 including: increased modularization of the code, UI changes, functionality additions, build system enhancements, cleaning of the code, testing, feature additions, performance tuning, XUL/XPCOM etc documentation, stability improvements, and legal issues.
Some people want it to come out on time. Others want it held back until they are happy with it (including I). Some people have long lists of things they want finished and have to finish. Therefore, it is unrealistic to give any estimates on arrival time. All I can say is that we are going to try our best.
Create the favicon, but please also put the in your pages so that eventually browsers will stop searching for favicon.ico. Microsoft created this mess and hopefully it can be fixed. Also, by using the method, you can have different icons on different parts of your site. Unfortunately, "shortcut icon" (also started by Microsoft as a response to complaints about logs) is not proper use of the link tag. It is saying that this is both a shortcut and an icon.
6
Evangalism bug for the method:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11029
Interesting... I recommend before you do anything else with your bookmarks that you go on the mozilla newsgroups or #mozillazine at irc.mozilla.org and see if anyone can help you figure out what happened.
Whoever moderated didn't get the joke. He (or she) meant Mozilla "the beast" was released as you can tell by his ASCII art. Whoever moderated this to redundant probably thought he was talking about the software being released.
I am a Mozilla developer, but I must give credit where credit is due. IE is a nice piece of software from a usability, appearance and stability standpoint. On the other hand, it is lacking in terms of standards compliance and number of features. I don't think its fair to attack the programmers for Microsoft because you don't like the company. They are just doing their job and following orders.
Sorry, I meant "he means".
I talked to Asa on IRC, and what she means is that Mozilla is a testing ground for Mozilla technologies such as XPIDL, XUL, XPCOM, and standards-compliance, etc for use by web applications and development of other applications - long term testing. As I am a developer, I was talking more of short-term testing of bugfixes, regression testing, and other such things that might dissappear by the time the milestone is released. :-) This goes to show that people can have different definitions of the same thing.
Asa: If people want to test Mozilla, then it is much better if they download a nightly build. That is what I meant. The nightly builds are the most up-to-date. If you mean testing before Netscape branches, then I agree with what you are saying, but also remember that Mozilla has evolved much further than being just a testing-ground for Netscape (as I assume you realize since you are Mozilla staff :)
That article is old and out of date. Mozilla milestones are meant to be stable releases that can be used as a personal browser. They are also for testing purposes, but not so much as the nightly binaries.
.1 versions or so.
I don't understand why he wants it to be slowed down, though. He doesn't have to download every milestone release that comes out.
I download Mozilla binaries about once a week, rebuild my source tree entirely once a week, and pull and build portions of the tree every day, so a month seems like a very long time to go between versions. Its all relative.
Therefore, if he wants to see a release schedule like Microsoft's, he can just download ever
If he thinks we should make releases less often and spend more time testing, he might have a valid point, but he should realize that Mozilla changes so much in a month it merits a new release.