The only thing I know about them is that they claimed to be releasing an "AOL PC" which wouldn't actually run AOL. Now, I'm not much of a fan of AOL, but the only people really hurt by this deceptive marketing are regular users who are led to believe that the computer they're purchasing does something that it doesn't actually do. (article here)
Also, they did at some point claim that Lindows ran most windows applications well, when in fact it just runs a few of them badly. (article here)
Honestly, they sound like a bunch of unscrupulous business people who have been making inroads at retail chains largely by making ridicoulous claims to management types who don't know the difference. I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them, and I certainly wouldn't give them any of my money. In fact, I'd really like to know why Slashdot gets so excited every time they do something--people like this aren't good for the Linux community.
You do not have the right to force a library to display porn. This is one of the most misunderstood things about the First Amendment: yes, you do have the right of speech, but you do not have the right to force people to listen.
Very true. Nowhere in my post did I say anything about forcing the library to display pronography. The whole point, in fact, is that the decision should be left up to the library, and shouldn't be forced one way or the other.
Should a library decide to loan out pornography, the patrons who are offended have every right not to go to that library any more. And before you make the inevitable "but they are forced to go there because where else would they borrow books" argument, consider this:
If someone who believes in evolution is offended that a library carries books about creationism (or vice-versa), that library can't be expected to get rid of all those books just because that person happens to be offended by them.
Pornography just happens to offend more people... and while you do have the right not to be directly harassed, you do not have the right to not be offended while in a public place. So I say again: If you don't like what's in the library, you're free not to go. And anyway, it's highly unlikely that libraries would start carrying pornography, because it would drive so many people away. It's legal right now, but no library does it, to my knowledge.
If there was a filter out there that ONLY blocked pornography, then it would be a different story.
No it wouldn't.
The problem with all these arguments is that they miss the point of the First Amendment, which protects any speech, not just speech that national moral standards deem worthwhile.
People don't like to talk about this openly, but the fact is that most of us like porn, at least in some form. Admittedly, the vast majority of porn has no redeeming social value, but that's not enough to make it against national law. The only reason the laws are as strict as they are is that a rich, highly vocal minority are imposing their religious moral standards upon the rest of the country--standards which are technically unconstitutional because they violate the doctrine of separation of church and state.
Diverting federal funds because of religious issues, while not technically making it against the law for libraries to allow unfettered internet access, is still mingling church and state.
Of course, there's the other side:
Would I myself walk into a library, sit down at a computer, and bring up a porn site? Absolutely not. It's rude and inconsiderate to other patrons, and any library ought to have a rule against it. But here's the clincher: It's the libaray's business what rules they decide to make and how they decide to enforce them, not the federal government's.
I ask Congress something they've been asked many times before, and will likely be asked many times again: What part of shall make no law don't you understand?
... has no chance in hell of getting his SCCCCCCCCCCA bill passed.
The correct abbreviation is "SSSCA" (Shitty Shitty Shitty Computer Act).
Not a bad troll.
on
Micro Tetris
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Well, this is cool, I'll give you that. Who would have thought that a video game could be built inside a water droplet, small enough to require an electron microscope just to play! Clearly, there is some interesting research happening over in Holland.
Nice opening, sounds pretty reasonable.
But I'm a little concerned about the "expensive" part. For those who aren't familiar with the Dutch language, I can tell you that "vrije" (as in "Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit") means "free." That is, it's a university without tuition, funded by socialist tax policies (this is very common in Europe).
Believable, possibly true. If it's actually false, you've made a fairly safe assumption that most people aren't going to look that up and verify it themselves.
My concern, then, is that taxpayer money (albeit that of Dutchmen) is being squandled on playing video games through binoculars.
Not bad at all. Leave it to the people who reply to your post to point out your failure to understand that the tetris game was just a proof of concept of some incredible miniaturization technology, as opposed to just a video game.
You might want to ignore this, thinking that it couldn't possible affect any of us, here in the USA. But remember that none of those countries have any kind of military power or weapons, so they have to rely on us to protect them.
Very good. By implying that American taxpayers are indirectly funding their highly expensive video games, you're smoothly transitioning into a ridiculous assertion, while maintaining the appearence of reason.
While we spend billions a year developing weapons that protect their easy lives of cheese and pornography, they waste their euros playing with the world's tiniest joystick.
Here's where you falter. The "cheese and pornography" bit is a rude stereotype, which tears down most of the work you've done toward building the belief that you're a thoughtful individual with an opinion worthy of consideration.
It's disgraceful to Science, and we should not tolerate it.
Not too bad, but a bit too strong in comparison to your intro.
Overall grade: B
You were doing pretty well up to the cheese and porno bit. The real trick is to be inflammatory while maintaining the appearance of courtesy, which you didn't quite pull off here. Keep at it!
No, write the damn code. That's what software freedom is about. You've missed the entire point.
Sadly, this is easier said that done. Simply getting into the Mozilla project is difficult at best--I myself have tried and failed, and no longer subscribe to the notion of "writing the damn code yourself."
Can we blame them for being ineffective at responding to new coders? Probably not. Mozilla is a massive project, and the people who keep tabs on that sort of thing most likely have more urgent things to do than respond to every newbie who offers to help out. On the other hand, the "write the code yourself" argument is arrogant and lazy, because it's not really an option for most people, even if they are willing to help and experienced coders. A better response would be that there are other things with higher priority which need doing first.
Additionally, as has been pointed out before, complete feature patches written by people who managed to get in to fix their "pet bug" often go unapplied for months. PNG alpha support under Windows (or was it Linux? I don't recall specifically) was an example for this--the patch was there for months, and the feature was continually ignored as it accumulated votes, until someone finally decided to put it in.
In the future, you may want to consider being a little bit less snide about people posting feature requests. Feature requests give a project direction, by allowing the coders to get a feel for what people would like the product to be like. Scoffing at them is intentionally ignoring the requests of your audience.
Ya know, as much as I love to see Hillary Rosen gagging on her own foot, this isn't really news. She went up against an audience of students--people who typically have very little money and are hostile toward big, greedy corporations--and lost a debate by popular vote. Big deal. I'm sure that most of the people who showed up were there because they already felt strongly one way or the other.
What I find strange is that she accepted this debate in the first place. Surely she must have known what she was getting into?
Which the artists typically have to cover. This is one of the reasons why they are considered the last stand for slavery! The RIAA usually gets nothing but a free ride.
Only if the artist makes it big. Generally, the cost of promoting an artist isn't equalled by the revenue that the artist brings in... Hence, the recording company usually takes the loss.
But then again, perhaps they're promoting the wrong way. Rather than paying big bucks to Clear Channel to get their music on the radio, they *could*, say, release music for free over the internet, thus skipping the radio payola entirely and keeping more CD sale money to themselves.
My qestion is this: Is the radio payola so much that it would make up for the loss of having less people buy their music? People who download entire albums are probably less likely to purchase the CD than someone who hears a couple songs over the radio.
Yeah, I tried the same thing... no luck for me either. You'd think that since it's under "default" there'd be some way to override it, but I have no idea where to start.
At any rate, I used to have a little shell script that would wget the latest mozilla nightly and then copy flash and the java VM into their appropriate places. I'd do something like that, and have it copy unix.js as well. It's kludgy, but it works.
Sounds like a really old bug. When Moz-Mail crashed, it used to corrupt its mail index files. The trick to getting at your mail again was just deleting the corrupt index. It would reindex them the next time it started. Nowadays, when it sees a corrupt index file, it rebuilds the index automatically.
How long ago did you have this problem? To my knowledge, it's been fine for over a year.
Ahh, I was wondering about that. All that aside, though, most people are just looking for antialiasing and really aren't concerned with what library is doing it. I wonder why they haven't turned it on by default... it's a frequently requested feature, and not many people are even aware that it's been implemented.
Last I heard, the general Mozilla project attitutde about documenting the preferences was that if you don't know what they are, you shouldn't mess with them. As a highly techincal user, I myself would beg to differ. Failing to document all of these options in one place is a cop-out, and their excuse is pure arrogance.
If I'm wrong about this, and there is complete documentation on all the prefs files, I'd love to know about it.
The binary of Mozilla that you have supports antialiasing right now.
Go here and follow the instructions near the top of the page. Provided you have a recent version of FreeType2 on your system and some TrueType fonts for it to find (you have to uncomment a line or two in your unix.js file and tell it where to look), you'll be using antialiased fonts in no time. It looks great, and I wish they'd do it by default. One other thing--you may want to set unhinted to "false", as fonts appear to render better that way. Experiment with your system, though.
I've gotten this to work with the latest Mozilla and an otherwise fresh install of Redhat 8, plus a few.ttf's in the directory "~/.fonts".
The tragic thing is, just as with development of manufacture, this colonial IP policiy hurts both the developin countries and the people in developed nations. They can't form a manufacturing base, we can't get real, honest, labor unions. And of course, by keeping so many people in the unmechanized fields and unsecured mineshafts, we are really missing out on the increadible behefits that a well educated _global_ populace could bring.
What's sad is that you're absolutely right. If people around the world have more money, more people buy our products, and we benefit greatly in the long run. However, getting to that point requires patience and sacrifice--and sadly, patience and sacrifice really aren't possible for our economy.
The root of the problem here is greed. Corporations are owned by stockholders, most of whom want to make a lot of money very quickly. Because of this, they make decisions that increase profits in the short run but are detrimental in the long run.
Take the recent story about AOL, for example. They know damn well that their customers don't like pop-ups, but they stuck pop-up advertising in anyway just to make a quick buck. Now, several years later, when people are leaving in droves because they're so sick of paying extra money for an annoying, sub-standard service, AOL is stuck in a position of having to win back the trust of its customers. A much more reliable way to succeed in the long run is to provide good value to your customers by providing a high quality product. This generally entails sacrifice in the short term to ensure stronger long term gains. Sadly, when you have a mob of stockholders who want money NOW, this isn't an option.
Likewise, people don't want to give up their billions of dollars NOW, even given the possibility of making trillions later on, to the vastly increased benefit of everyone involved. I just wish there were something that could be reasonably done about it.
"In the event of a water landing, I am equipped to serve as a floatation device." -Lara Croft
I think liking massive, balloon-like honkers is a matter of taste. Now, I like video game babes as much as the next guy, but I've always found Lara Croft to be laughably ridiculous. As for evidence, well, I can say that a lot of ludicrous video game boobs come out of Japan--thus, America isn't the only place where this is prevelant.
Seriously. If you don't have anything new to add to the comments, just write up something summarizing the problems you've already seen. In doing that, you let congress know that you as a consumer actually care about your fair use rights.
The comments on this legislation so far are overwhelmingly negative. Let's keep it that way, by letting them know that normal individuals absolutely do not want to be subject to mandatory DRM.
Oh, and I'll echo something that was said above: Editors, why the hell isn't this up on the front page where more people can see it? This is a chance for us sedentary slashdotters to make an impression without getting up off of our butts and going to the post office. We should take advantage of that.
P.S. I already submitted my comment. Have you submitted yours?
When they say they're going to distribute 75.7 million dollars *worth* of CDs, are they talking about the number of CDs they could stamp out for that amount of money, or the number of CD's that they'd sell for that amount of money?
The former would probably be about 400 million (at ~20 cents per CD), while the latter is closer to 5 million (at $15 per CD). Mind you, i'm not sure how much packaging costs, but I do know that the actual cost of stamping CDs approaches 10 cents apiece after you'd paid for all your equipment.
Having said that, most "start over" projects are massive failures, or that end up just as ugly when they implement all the same kludges to work around issues they thought they wouldn't have, but given that you're talking about volunteers that are looking to do stuff new and fun, I'd expect there to be a burgeoning industry of "Super Duper OS" type projects.
There are, for the record, a few notable exceptions to this... Mozilla being the most prominent. If you measure success solely on how well their program works, then the Mozilla Project has been very successful. They've created a browser suite built on top of their own open development platform, and this development platform is now being used by other people to build more applications on top of Mozilla.
Unfortunately, what these massive, ambitious rewrites usually cost is time. If you measure success solely by user adoption rates, then Mozilla is a dismal failure. (I should point out that I use Mozilla as my primary browser, and love it.)
Hurd may very well turn out to be the ultimate OS kernel, but it spent so long in the vapor stages that people don't take it seriously. It may still gain a foothold, but there's a long road ahead.
The problem, I think, is that people really haven't taken a whole lot of interest in it so far, because in general it doesn't really do anything that Linux doesn't already do better.
On the other hand, if it's really going to be able to run modern desktop environments now, perhaps people will start taking a bit more interest in it, and then developers will start to show up. I think it's just a matter of reaching critical mass.
That's exactly what he wants! Pretty soon the slashdot moderation system will be bogged down with everyone trying to mod down his post, and then they'll be forced to repeal it!
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing I know about them is that they claimed to be releasing an "AOL PC" which wouldn't actually run AOL. Now, I'm not much of a fan of AOL, but the only people really hurt by this deceptive marketing are regular users who are led to believe that the computer they're purchasing does something that it doesn't actually do. (article here)
Also, they did at some point claim that Lindows ran most windows applications well, when in fact it just runs a few of them badly. (article here)
Honestly, they sound like a bunch of unscrupulous business people who have been making inroads at retail chains largely by making ridicoulous claims to management types who don't know the difference. I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them, and I certainly wouldn't give them any of my money. In fact, I'd really like to know why Slashdot gets so excited every time they do something--people like this aren't good for the Linux community.
You stop right now, or we'll issue an ultimatum!
You do not have the right to force a library to display porn. This is one of the most misunderstood things about the First Amendment: yes, you do have the right of speech, but you do not have the right to force people to listen.
Very true. Nowhere in my post did I say anything about forcing the library to display pronography. The whole point, in fact, is that the decision should be left up to the library, and shouldn't be forced one way or the other.
Should a library decide to loan out pornography, the patrons who are offended have every right not to go to that library any more. And before you make the inevitable "but they are forced to go there because where else would they borrow books" argument, consider this:
If someone who believes in evolution is offended that a library carries books about creationism (or vice-versa), that library can't be expected to get rid of all those books just because that person happens to be offended by them.
Pornography just happens to offend more people... and while you do have the right not to be directly harassed, you do not have the right to not be offended while in a public place. So I say again: If you don't like what's in the library, you're free not to go. And anyway, it's highly unlikely that libraries would start carrying pornography, because it would drive so many people away. It's legal right now, but no library does it, to my knowledge.
If there was a filter out there that ONLY blocked pornography, then it would be a different story.
No it wouldn't.
The problem with all these arguments is that they miss the point of the First Amendment, which protects any speech, not just speech that national moral standards deem worthwhile.
People don't like to talk about this openly, but the fact is that most of us like porn, at least in some form. Admittedly, the vast majority of porn has no redeeming social value, but that's not enough to make it against national law. The only reason the laws are as strict as they are is that a rich, highly vocal minority are imposing their religious moral standards upon the rest of the country--standards which are technically unconstitutional because they violate the doctrine of separation of church and state.
Diverting federal funds because of religious issues, while not technically making it against the law for libraries to allow unfettered internet access, is still mingling church and state.
Of course, there's the other side:
Would I myself walk into a library, sit down at a computer, and bring up a porn site? Absolutely not. It's rude and inconsiderate to other patrons, and any library ought to have a rule against it. But here's the clincher: It's the libaray's business what rules they decide to make and how they decide to enforce them, not the federal government's.
I ask Congress something they've been asked many times before, and will likely be asked many times again: What part of shall make no law don't you understand?
... has no chance in hell of getting his SCCCCCCCCCCA bill passed.
The correct abbreviation is "SSSCA" (Shitty Shitty Shitty Computer Act).
Well, this is cool, I'll give you that. Who would have thought that a video game could be built inside a water droplet, small enough to require an electron microscope just to play! Clearly, there is some interesting research happening over in Holland.
Nice opening, sounds pretty reasonable.
But I'm a little concerned about the "expensive" part. For those who aren't familiar with the Dutch language, I can tell you that "vrije" (as in "Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit") means "free." That is, it's a university without tuition, funded by socialist tax policies (this is very common in Europe).
Believable, possibly true. If it's actually false, you've made a fairly safe assumption that most people aren't going to look that up and verify it themselves.
My concern, then, is that taxpayer money (albeit that of Dutchmen) is being squandled on playing video games through binoculars.
Not bad at all. Leave it to the people who reply to your post to point out your failure to understand that the tetris game was just a proof of concept of some incredible miniaturization technology, as opposed to just a video game.
You might want to ignore this, thinking that it couldn't possible affect any of us, here in the USA. But remember that none of those countries have any kind of military power or weapons, so they have to rely on us to protect them.
Very good. By implying that American taxpayers are indirectly funding their highly expensive video games, you're smoothly transitioning into a ridiculous assertion, while maintaining the appearence of reason.
While we spend billions a year developing weapons that protect their easy lives of cheese and pornography, they waste their euros playing with the world's tiniest joystick.
Here's where you falter. The "cheese and pornography" bit is a rude stereotype, which tears down most of the work you've done toward building the belief that you're a thoughtful individual with an opinion worthy of consideration.
It's disgraceful to Science, and we should not tolerate it.
Not too bad, but a bit too strong in comparison to your intro.
Overall grade: B
You were doing pretty well up to the cheese and porno bit. The real trick is to be inflammatory while maintaining the appearance of courtesy, which you didn't quite pull off here. Keep at it!
No, write the damn code. That's what software freedom is about. You've missed the entire point.
Sadly, this is easier said that done. Simply getting into the Mozilla project is difficult at best--I myself have tried and failed, and no longer subscribe to the notion of "writing the damn code yourself."
Can we blame them for being ineffective at responding to new coders? Probably not. Mozilla is a massive project, and the people who keep tabs on that sort of thing most likely have more urgent things to do than respond to every newbie who offers to help out. On the other hand, the "write the code yourself" argument is arrogant and lazy, because it's not really an option for most people, even if they are willing to help and experienced coders. A better response would be that there are other things with higher priority which need doing first.
Additionally, as has been pointed out before, complete feature patches written by people who managed to get in to fix their "pet bug" often go unapplied for months. PNG alpha support under Windows (or was it Linux? I don't recall specifically) was an example for this--the patch was there for months, and the feature was continually ignored as it accumulated votes, until someone finally decided to put it in.
In the future, you may want to consider being a little bit less snide about people posting feature requests. Feature requests give a project direction, by allowing the coders to get a feel for what people would like the product to be like. Scoffing at them is intentionally ignoring the requests of your audience.
Check out this list.
Seriously, how can you sue "The Little Pie Company" and still claim to have a soul?
If you're doing this under redhat 8, I'd love to see your screenshots (both with an without). Can you post links?
Ya know, as much as I love to see Hillary Rosen gagging on her own foot, this isn't really news. She went up against an audience of students--people who typically have very little money and are hostile toward big, greedy corporations--and lost a debate by popular vote. Big deal. I'm sure that most of the people who showed up were there because they already felt strongly one way or the other.
What I find strange is that she accepted this debate in the first place. Surely she must have known what she was getting into?
Actually, your fonts will look better if you set unhinted to false (but leave autohinted to true)
Bart
Their only expenses are production and promotion.
Which the artists typically have to cover. This is one of the reasons why they are considered the last stand for slavery! The RIAA usually gets nothing but a free ride.
Only if the artist makes it big. Generally, the cost of promoting an artist isn't equalled by the revenue that the artist brings in... Hence, the recording company usually takes the loss.
But then again, perhaps they're promoting the wrong way. Rather than paying big bucks to Clear Channel to get their music on the radio, they *could*, say, release music for free over the internet, thus skipping the radio payola entirely and keeping more CD sale money to themselves.
My qestion is this: Is the radio payola so much that it would make up for the loss of having less people buy their music? People who download entire albums are probably less likely to purchase the CD than someone who hears a couple songs over the radio.
Yeah, I tried the same thing... no luck for me either. You'd think that since it's under "default" there'd be some way to override it, but I have no idea where to start.
At any rate, I used to have a little shell script that would wget the latest mozilla nightly and then copy flash and the java VM into their appropriate places. I'd do something like that, and have it copy unix.js as well. It's kludgy, but it works.
Sounds like a really old bug. When Moz-Mail crashed, it used to corrupt its mail index files. The trick to getting at your mail again was just deleting the corrupt index. It would reindex them the next time it started. Nowadays, when it sees a corrupt index file, it rebuilds the index automatically.
How long ago did you have this problem? To my knowledge, it's been fine for over a year.
Ahh, I was wondering about that. All that aside, though, most people are just looking for antialiasing and really aren't concerned with what library is doing it. I wonder why they haven't turned it on by default... it's a frequently requested feature, and not many people are even aware that it's been implemented.
Last I heard, the general Mozilla project attitutde about documenting the preferences was that if you don't know what they are, you shouldn't mess with them. As a highly techincal user, I myself would beg to differ. Failing to document all of these options in one place is a cop-out, and their excuse is pure arrogance.
If I'm wrong about this, and there is complete documentation on all the prefs files, I'd love to know about it.
The binary of Mozilla that you have supports antialiasing right now.
.ttf's in the directory "~/.fonts".
Go here and follow the instructions near the top of the page. Provided you have a recent version of FreeType2 on your system and some TrueType fonts for it to find (you have to uncomment a line or two in your unix.js file and tell it where to look), you'll be using antialiased fonts in no time. It looks great, and I wish they'd do it by default. One other thing--you may want to set unhinted to "false", as fonts appear to render better that way. Experiment with your system, though.
I've gotten this to work with the latest Mozilla and an otherwise fresh install of Redhat 8, plus a few
The tragic thing is, just as with development of manufacture, this colonial IP policiy hurts both the developin countries and the people in developed nations. They can't form a manufacturing base, we can't get real, honest, labor unions. And of course, by keeping so many people in the unmechanized fields and unsecured mineshafts, we are really missing out on the increadible behefits that a well educated _global_ populace could bring.
What's sad is that you're absolutely right. If people around the world have more money, more people buy our products, and we benefit greatly in the long run. However, getting to that point requires patience and sacrifice--and sadly, patience and sacrifice really aren't possible for our economy.
The root of the problem here is greed. Corporations are owned by stockholders, most of whom want to make a lot of money very quickly. Because of this, they make decisions that increase profits in the short run but are detrimental in the long run.
Take the recent story about AOL, for example. They know damn well that their customers don't like pop-ups, but they stuck pop-up advertising in anyway just to make a quick buck. Now, several years later, when people are leaving in droves because they're so sick of paying extra money for an annoying, sub-standard service, AOL is stuck in a position of having to win back the trust of its customers. A much more reliable way to succeed in the long run is to provide good value to your customers by providing a high quality product. This generally entails sacrifice in the short term to ensure stronger long term gains. Sadly, when you have a mob of stockholders who want money NOW, this isn't an option.
Likewise, people don't want to give up their billions of dollars NOW, even given the possibility of making trillions later on, to the vastly increased benefit of everyone involved. I just wish there were something that could be reasonably done about it.
"In the event of a water landing, I am equipped to serve as a floatation device." -Lara Croft
I think liking massive, balloon-like honkers is a matter of taste. Now, I like video game babes as much as the next guy, but I've always found Lara Croft to be laughably ridiculous. As for evidence, well, I can say that a lot of ludicrous video game boobs come out of Japan--thus, America isn't the only place where this is prevelant.
Seriously. If you don't have anything new to add to the comments, just write up something summarizing the problems you've already seen. In doing that, you let congress know that you as a consumer actually care about your fair use rights.
The comments on this legislation so far are overwhelmingly negative. Let's keep it that way, by letting them know that normal individuals absolutely do not want to be subject to mandatory DRM.
Oh, and I'll echo something that was said above: Editors, why the hell isn't this up on the front page where more people can see it? This is a chance for us sedentary slashdotters to make an impression without getting up off of our butts and going to the post office. We should take advantage of that.
P.S. I already submitted my comment. Have you submitted yours?
When they say they're going to distribute 75.7 million dollars *worth* of CDs, are they talking about the number of CDs they could stamp out for that amount of money, or the number of CD's that they'd sell for that amount of money?
The former would probably be about 400 million (at ~20 cents per CD), while the latter is closer to 5 million (at $15 per CD). Mind you, i'm not sure how much packaging costs, but I do know that the actual cost of stamping CDs approaches 10 cents apiece after you'd paid for all your equipment.
Having said that, most "start over" projects are massive failures, or that end up just as ugly when they implement all the same kludges to work around issues they thought they wouldn't have, but given that you're talking about volunteers that are looking to do stuff new and fun, I'd expect there to be a burgeoning industry of "Super Duper OS" type projects.
There are, for the record, a few notable exceptions to this... Mozilla being the most prominent. If you measure success solely on how well their program works, then the Mozilla Project has been very successful. They've created a browser suite built on top of their own open development platform, and this development platform is now being used by other people to build more applications on top of Mozilla.
Unfortunately, what these massive, ambitious rewrites usually cost is time. If you measure success solely by user adoption rates, then Mozilla is a dismal failure. (I should point out that I use Mozilla as my primary browser, and love it.)
Hurd may very well turn out to be the ultimate OS kernel, but it spent so long in the vapor stages that people don't take it seriously. It may still gain a foothold, but there's a long road ahead.
Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! *gasp, pant, pant* Developers! Developers! Developers!
The problem, I think, is that people really haven't taken a whole lot of interest in it so far, because in general it doesn't really do anything that Linux doesn't already do better.
On the other hand, if it's really going to be able to run modern desktop environments now, perhaps people will start taking a bit more interest in it, and then developers will start to show up. I think it's just a matter of reaching critical mass.
Right, right. Offtopic. Certainly not, say, an on-topic joke that went over your head.
That's exactly what he wants! Pretty soon the slashdot moderation system will be bogged down with everyone trying to mod down his post, and then they'll be forced to repeal it!