And of course there is always Galeon
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 2
Galeon is a plain Gnome wrapper around Gecko and it's worked a treat for me. Stable, much lighter-weight than full-blown Mozilla, but full of crunchy Gecko goodness.
1. TeX, at least, is famously NOT buggy.
2. There need be no pressure to meet deadlines in an Open Source model. Projects can and do delay until standards are met rather than ship "on time". (Eg 2.4 linux kernel, mozilla,...)
3. "Open source, by itself, can't solve shoddy software engineering practices." Where was this claimed? Straw man.
4. Are you saying professionals do not write open source software? Or that all commercial software is written by professionals (with the standards that implies)?
5. I have an open source subscription where I receive regular bug fixes. It is called "apt-get upgrade". If I wanted a premium service, Ximian are tooling up to do just that.
Is there a fund to support Sklyarov's family? Personally I would be happy to contribute to it - life in Russia is hard enough without having one of the family wage-earners in jail.
If you're indo-european, your conception of gods is likely to include "big guy with long hair and big beard".
Apparently one factor in the conversion of Scandinavian pagans to Christianity was the similarity of the cross symbol to the Thor's hammer symbol. Not to mention the "resurrected dead guy nailed to a tree" meme (Jesus=Odin) or the "slain good god" meme (Baldur) or the "world ends to be replaced by something better" meme (Ragnarok=Apocalypse).
Furthermore, the tightly integrated outliner/scripting language/object database that lies at the core of Frontier is bogglingly cool, useful, and fun. Dissing it as "legacy Mac stuff" is to ignore an outstanding example of something that has no equivalent in the Unix world at all.
Long ago I worked at a University where the computer use regulations were phrased so that we could bust you for more or less anything we liked. No one was happy about this, but there was a reason: the arms race of CS students vs administrators.
As soon as we prohibited antisocial activity X, clever students would come up with equivalent activity Y which would not be covered by the original wording, but caused similar (or worse) harm. It turned out that it was terribly difficult to clearly delineate what was and was not acceptable use of the campus facilities in a way that was actually useful (ie protected the privacy of staff and students, allocated server resources fairly, protected the Uni from legal liability). So we gave up:(
Classic quote: "Our firewall isn't there to protect the campus network from the outside world. It's there to protect the rest of the world from our students."
Sometimes it is a good idea to interact with technology at a low level.
I get instant physical feedback from a car. I can use muscle memory and habit to make driving unconscious. It would be painful and ridiculous to drive via voice commands.
Programming something is different, I think, to operating it. When we start writing shell scripts and pipelines we're programming. When we type up and format a document, we're just operating.
There is a fuzzy line past which it becomes easier to use language than physical movements, which is why I like OSs that offer both.
So I see the neccessity for CLIs. But the fact that GUIs offer interaction at a more primitive level does not make them a bad thing.
It's great to hear that there is a royal Tongan who is kind, honest and genuine. That doesn't prove anything about the Tongan govt as a whole tho.
I agree that selling some rights to anonymous data is an excellent way to get some revenue for Tonga, which could certainly do with it. But the original article implies rather more than that: in particular the sentence "any serum or DNA samples collected
in Tonga shall remain the property of Tonga " implies that ownership of the data does not lie with the donor but with their government.
It's a shame there isn't more detail about that, or about whether data will be anonymised, or whether it will be accessible to other researchers, etc.
The dissenters I was referring to were journalists who wrote and published stories critical of the government and the royal family in local newspapers.
Reading human rights materials on the web, I understand Tongan prisons are pretty primitive, but in line with general living conditions.
I don't think that's of any great comfort for anyone imprisoned in Tonga though.
You are quite right that snap judgements are uninformed ones. But writing off my post as a snap judgement was a snap judgement itself.
How can you tell? Suppose I'm an indigenous Australian? Would that change your view?
What about if I were Japanese?
>You are subconcious racist, you write harmful things without even realizing it.
How was what I wrote harmful? To whom, precisely? If it was harmful to King Tupou, then I can't say I'm very sorry.
> Only with long and painful process of soulsearching and admission of (historical) guilt can a white learn to live as a world citizen in a colorblind multicultural world.
If you want to live in a colourblind world, you sure have a funny way of showing it:-)
Indeed not. But this one certainly has been. If you haven't found anything by searching, you haven't looked very far.
A simple search on Google for Tonga and Corruption yields this:
1. Imprisonment of dissenting journalists.
http://www.transparency.de/documents/newsletter/ 98.2/reports.html
2. Passports and citizenship are sold to foreign nationals.
http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/spin/SPINDOC/larmour97 1.html
3. The current land minister has been convicted of illegal land transfer deals in the 80s. Critics of his appointment as minister were imprisoned.
http://www.tongatapu.net.to/tonga/news/briefs/ss 980319.htm
4. The king dissolved the parliament after it voted to impeach the minister for corruption.
http://jinx.sistm.unsw.edu.au/~greenlft/1996/250 /250p2b.htm
Etc.
I am not an American. I'm a New Zealander. (And I'm far from impressed with American efforts in the South Pacific thus far. Had there been an article about American Samoa, Kiribati, Paula, the Marshall Islands, etc, you would have seen criticism of US policy from me.)
As it is, New Zealand has a large Tongan minority and Tongan affairs are commonly in the news here. I strongly suspect I'm better informed than you are.
I actually wish this hadn't been modded as flamebait - I think it's an interesting question.
1. You don't know that I'm white
2. I strongly doubt that there is a monolithic Tongan culture, tradition or set of values to which all Tongans subscribe - else why would Tongan commoners such as Akilisi Pohiva be trying to change their system? See http://138.25.138.94/acij/ACIJ/Tonga/tonga-terrori sm.html
3. White, bigoted imperialist is a weird term of abuse to apply to someone who criticizes a class-ridden society with a hereditary aristocracy:-)
4. Robust systems that exist with the consent of their people generally don't need to imprison their critics.
That certainly doesn't sound so bad. You can't tell from reading the article exactly what it is that Autogen or the Tongan state have the rights to.
Certainly it represents valuable foreign exchange for a tiny country, and you can't fault people for exploiting their own genepool as a natural resource.
But the original article lends itself to more sinister interpretations as well.
I note that apparently Autogen has exclusive rights over all samples collected in Tonga, which in turn belong to Tonga.
So if Jonah Lomu gives blood in New Zealand, it belongs to him. If he goes home to Tonga, all rights over it belong to Autogen.
./ers may not be aware that Tonga still has a autocratic monarchy, with a parliament with a majority of seats guaranteed to noble families. Tongans who want a democratic system tend to find themselves in jail. Looks to me like Autogen has cynically found a jurisdiction with a compliant and corrupt ruling clique. Shame on them.
This article tells a bit more. The headline angle is that taxpayer money will pay telco's for their trouble. It sounds promising, in that the Herald is usually a pretty conservative paper.
This will work for exactly as long as it takes to pass a law forbidding the practise. No longer.
Example 1: France for a long time forbade strong crypto. It was possible to use it to protect information, but the risks of being caught doing so must have often outweighed the benefits of privacy.
Example 2: Australia now requires ISPs to be responsible for Internet content, even though they can not effectively monitor or filter content. No doubt some poor ISP will find themselves prosecuted under this law.
Essentially, we have a political problem here, and the best solution is also political: to prevent such laws being passed, and to repeal existing ones. This is hard to swallow for people who would rather hack on computers than society, but I think it's the only long term way.
I'm working in the UK right now. On Friday, I made the mistake of telling a meeting full of Englishmen that their government was bad and stupid, and how things were better back in New Zealand. After all, we have a Bill of Rights, a Privacy Commissioner, and the most uncorrupt administration in the Southern Hemisphere.
New Zealand is seeing a steady erosion in privacy and individual liberty, all in the name of crime prevention and detection. We host the Echelon system, we have passed laws restricting freedom of association with known criminals (tough shit if you're a social worker, eh?), we've made it easier for the police to obtain telecomms interception warrants, and we have a proliferation of cameras whose main effect is to drive street crime onto the fringes of cities instead of the centre.
This has happened with the best of intentions, aided by people who would be horrified at the suggestion that they were bit by bit contributing to the apparatus needed for a totalitarian state.
Unfortunately, privacy violation has no direct physical effects on people - it enables other abuses - so it's hard to muster public opposition until the abuse of power leads to some outrage. Of course, by that stage it may too late.
Therefore, I don't see much hope of a mass movement supporting privacy rights, especially when the inflammatory issues of paedophila and gangs get dragged in. Rational debate is futile in the face of Paul Holmes. (Overseas readers: The Holmes show is a popular television programme masquerading as a current events show but specialising in the pornograpphy of emotion). Abused children are a concrete wrong people can get upset about, invaded privacy is an abstract hurt that doesn't motivate sympathy.
However, every concerned Kiwi reader should think about joining the political party of their choice to try and make this an issue in their own party. This is an issue that crosses party lines. It's cheap to join any of NZ's mainstream political parties, and now that membership is so low in most of them, individual participation can have more effect than it could in the 70s or 80s.
I don't think crypto is the answer, since even when it is easily used, most people cannot protect their keys, and behave in ways that compromise security. In any case, I want to live in a society where I can assume I am not being monitored, not one where I have to consciously protect my communications.
Personally I feel despondent about checking this trend. We're seeing more instrusive "news" (how did you feel when your husband was shot), a rise in gossip and scandal, and shows whose whole rationale is snooping. The more and more we use invaded privacy for entertainment, the more we become inured to the idea that our private lives can be fodder for other people, and our privacy of little value. But I can't sit still.
I just happen to have been working on a project using interactive digital television with set top boxes. The boxes have wireless keyboards (using IR). The signal between the keyboard and the STB is not encrypted. The signal can be picked up from 50 feet away. Since the application requires authentication, this has created quite a headache...
At one workplace, where I was a union representative, there was an issue where someone was being victimised by their immediate supervisor. The HR department were quite enlightened, and were pleased to have evidecne that said boss was responsible for the alarming rate of resignations. It was a large site with open-plan offices. Private phone calls to HR were impractical. Note, all parties concerned were workers at the same organisation.
In general, a private channel is often very helpful in intra-organisational disputes.
Slashdot Mirror
Galeon is a plain Gnome wrapper around Gecko and it's worked a treat for me. Stable, much lighter-weight than full-blown Mozilla, but full of crunchy Gecko goodness.
1. TeX, at least, is famously NOT buggy. ...)
2. There need be no pressure to meet deadlines in an Open Source model. Projects can and do delay until standards are met rather than ship "on time". (Eg 2.4 linux kernel, mozilla,
3. "Open source, by itself, can't solve shoddy software engineering practices." Where was this claimed? Straw man.
4. Are you saying professionals do not write open source software? Or that all commercial software is written by professionals (with the standards that implies)?
5. I have an open source subscription where I receive regular bug fixes. It is called "apt-get upgrade". If I wanted a premium service, Ximian are tooling up to do just that.
Is there a fund to support Sklyarov's family? Personally I would be happy to contribute to it - life in Russia is hard enough without having one of the family wage-earners in jail.
You want this:
u si c&c=meldex&a=page&p=query&aq=0
http://nzdl2.cs.waikato.ac.nz/cgi-bin/gwmm?mt=m
Lloyd Smith, David Bainbridge are two people at the University of Waikato I used to know who were working (successfully!) on this problem.
Thanks. I really, really needed that image.
If you're indo-european, your conception of gods is likely to include "big guy with long hair and big beard".
Apparently one factor in the conversion of Scandinavian pagans to Christianity was the similarity of the cross symbol to the Thor's hammer symbol. Not to mention the "resurrected dead guy nailed to a tree" meme (Jesus=Odin) or the "slain good god" meme (Baldur) or the "world ends to be replaced by something better" meme (Ragnarok=Apocalypse).
It's not.
Frontier/Manila/Radio Userland all run on NT.
Furthermore, the tightly integrated outliner/scripting language/object database that lies at the core of Frontier is bogglingly cool, useful, and fun. Dissing it as "legacy Mac stuff" is to ignore an outstanding example of something that has no equivalent in the Unix world at all.
Long ago I worked at a University where the computer use regulations were phrased so that we could bust you for more or less anything we liked. No one was happy about this, but there was a reason: the arms race of CS students vs administrators.
:(
As soon as we prohibited antisocial activity X, clever students would come up with equivalent activity Y which would not be covered by the original wording, but caused similar (or worse) harm. It turned out that it was terribly difficult to clearly delineate what was and was not acceptable use of the campus facilities in a way that was actually useful (ie protected the privacy of staff and students, allocated server resources fairly, protected the Uni from legal liability). So we gave up
Classic quote: "Our firewall isn't there to protect the campus network from the outside world. It's there to protect the rest of the world from our students."
Sometimes it is a good idea to interact with technology at a low level.
I get instant physical feedback from a car. I can use muscle memory and habit to make driving unconscious. It would be painful and ridiculous to drive via voice commands.
Programming something is different, I think, to operating it. When we start writing shell scripts and pipelines we're programming. When we type up and format a document, we're just operating.
There is a fuzzy line past which it becomes easier to use language than physical movements, which is why I like OSs that offer both.
So I see the neccessity for CLIs. But the fact that GUIs offer interaction at a more primitive level does not make them a bad thing.
It's great to hear that there is a royal Tongan who is kind, honest and genuine. That doesn't prove anything about the Tongan govt as a whole tho.
I agree that selling some rights to anonymous data is an excellent way to get some revenue for Tonga, which could certainly do with it. But the original article implies rather more than that: in particular the sentence "any serum or DNA samples collected
in Tonga shall remain the property of Tonga " implies that ownership of the data does not lie with the donor but with their government.
It's a shame there isn't more detail about that, or about whether data will be anonymised, or whether it will be accessible to other researchers, etc.
Certainly.
The dissenters I was referring to were journalists who wrote and published stories critical of the government and the royal family in local newspapers.
Reading human rights materials on the web, I understand Tongan prisons are pretty primitive, but in line with general living conditions.
I don't think that's of any great comfort for anyone imprisoned in Tonga though.
You are quite right that snap judgements are uninformed ones. But writing off my post as a snap judgement was a snap judgement itself.
> But your white aren't you?
:-)
How can you tell? Suppose I'm an indigenous Australian? Would that change your view?
What about if I were Japanese?
>You are subconcious racist, you write harmful things without even realizing it.
How was what I wrote harmful? To whom, precisely? If it was harmful to King Tupou, then I can't say I'm very sorry.
> Only with long and painful process of soulsearching and admission of (historical) guilt can a white learn to live as a world citizen in a colorblind multicultural world.
If you want to live in a colourblind world, you sure have a funny way of showing it
"monarchy != corrupt regime".
/ 98.2/reports.html
7 1.html
s 980319.htm
0 /250p2b.htm
Indeed not. But this one certainly has been. If you haven't found anything by searching, you haven't looked very far.
A simple search on Google for Tonga and Corruption yields this:
1. Imprisonment of dissenting journalists.
http://www.transparency.de/documents/newsletter
2. Passports and citizenship are sold to foreign nationals.
http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/spin/SPINDOC/larmour9
3. The current land minister has been convicted of illegal land transfer deals in the 80s. Critics of his appointment as minister were imprisoned.
http://www.tongatapu.net.to/tonga/news/briefs/s
4. The king dissolved the parliament after it voted to impeach the minister for corruption.
http://jinx.sistm.unsw.edu.au/~greenlft/1996/25
Etc.
I am not an American. I'm a New Zealander. (And I'm far from impressed with American efforts in the South Pacific thus far. Had there been an article about American Samoa, Kiribati, Paula, the Marshall Islands, etc, you would have seen criticism of US policy from me.)
As it is, New Zealand has a large Tongan minority and Tongan affairs are commonly in the news here. I strongly suspect I'm better informed than you are.
I actually wish this hadn't been modded as flamebait - I think it's an interesting question.
i sm.html
:-)
1. You don't know that I'm white
2. I strongly doubt that there is a monolithic Tongan culture, tradition or set of values to which all Tongans subscribe - else why would Tongan commoners such as Akilisi Pohiva be trying to change their system? See http://138.25.138.94/acij/ACIJ/Tonga/tonga-terror
3. White, bigoted imperialist is a weird term of abuse to apply to someone who criticizes a class-ridden society with a hereditary aristocracy
4. Robust systems that exist with the consent of their people generally don't need to imprison their critics.
That certainly doesn't sound so bad. You can't tell from reading the article exactly what it is that Autogen or the Tongan state have the rights to.
Certainly it represents valuable foreign exchange for a tiny country, and you can't fault people for exploiting their own genepool as a natural resource.
But the original article lends itself to more sinister interpretations as well.
For "government" read "Tongan Royal Family", doing what aristocrats do best.
I note that apparently Autogen has exclusive rights over all samples collected in Tonga, which in turn belong to Tonga.
So if Jonah Lomu gives blood in New Zealand, it belongs to him. If he goes home to Tonga, all rights over it belong to Autogen.
./ers may not be aware that Tonga still has a autocratic monarchy, with a parliament with a majority of seats guaranteed to noble families. Tongans who want a democratic system tend to find themselves in jail. Looks to me like Autogen has cynically found a jurisdiction with a compliant and corrupt ruling clique. Shame on them.
No, I think you've misunderstood.
The market they refer to is the midrange SERVER market. Hence the great showing for Unix.
Also, bear in mind they look at units sold; NT server farms mean that NT is overrepresented compared to a metric based on users served.
The article appears here.
This will work for exactly as long as it takes to pass a law forbidding the practise. No longer.
Example 1: France for a long time forbade strong crypto. It was possible to use it to protect information, but the risks of being caught doing so must have often outweighed the benefits of privacy.
Example 2: Australia now requires ISPs to be responsible for Internet content, even though they can not effectively monitor or filter content. No doubt some poor ISP will find themselves prosecuted under this law.
Essentially, we have a political problem here, and the best solution is also political: to prevent such laws being passed, and to repeal existing ones. This is hard to swallow for people who would rather hack on computers than society, but I think it's the only long term way.
Probably the low figure is Wellington City, and excludes the Hutt valley, Porirua, Johnsonville, etc.
I'm working in the UK right now. On Friday, I made the mistake of telling a meeting full of Englishmen that their government was bad and stupid, and how things were better back in New Zealand. After all, we have a Bill of Rights, a Privacy Commissioner, and the most uncorrupt administration in the Southern Hemisphere.
I'm going to take it all back on Monday.
New Zealand is seeing a steady erosion in privacy and individual liberty, all in the name of crime prevention and detection. We host the Echelon system, we have passed laws restricting freedom of association with known criminals (tough shit if you're a social worker, eh?), we've made it easier for the police to obtain telecomms interception warrants, and we have a proliferation of cameras whose main effect is to drive street crime onto the fringes of cities instead of the centre.
This has happened with the best of intentions, aided by people who would be horrified at the suggestion that they were bit by bit contributing to the apparatus needed for a totalitarian state.
Unfortunately, privacy violation has no direct physical effects on people - it enables other abuses - so it's hard to muster public opposition until the abuse of power leads to some outrage. Of course, by that stage it may too late.
Therefore, I don't see much hope of a mass movement supporting privacy rights, especially when the inflammatory issues of paedophila and gangs get dragged in. Rational debate is futile in the face of Paul Holmes. (Overseas readers: The Holmes show is a popular television programme masquerading as a current events show but specialising in the pornograpphy of emotion). Abused children are a concrete wrong people can get upset about, invaded privacy is an abstract hurt that doesn't motivate sympathy.
However, every concerned Kiwi reader should think about joining the political party of their choice to try and make this an issue in their own party. This is an issue that crosses party lines. It's cheap to join any of NZ's mainstream political parties, and now that membership is so low in most of them, individual participation can have more effect than it could in the 70s or 80s.
I don't think crypto is the answer, since even when it is easily used, most people cannot protect their keys, and behave in ways that compromise security. In any case, I want to live in a society where I can assume I am not being monitored, not one where I have to consciously protect my communications.
Personally I feel despondent about checking this trend. We're seeing more instrusive "news" (how did you feel when your husband was shot), a rise in gossip and scandal, and shows whose whole rationale is snooping. The more and more we use invaded privacy for entertainment, the more we become inured to the idea that our private lives can be fodder for other people, and our privacy of little value. But I can't sit still.
I just happen to have been working on a project using interactive digital television with set top boxes. The boxes have wireless keyboards (using IR). The signal between the keyboard and the STB is not encrypted. The signal can be picked up from 50 feet away. Since the application requires authentication, this has created quite a headache...
At one workplace, where I was a union representative, there was an issue where someone was being victimised by their immediate supervisor. The HR department were quite enlightened, and were pleased to have evidecne that said boss was responsible for the alarming rate of resignations. It was a large site with open-plan offices. Private phone calls to HR were impractical. Note, all parties concerned were workers at the same organisation.
In general, a private channel is often very helpful in intra-organisational disputes.
Stephen