Re:What are Netscape doing?
on
Netscape 4.6
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· Score: 1
What I mean is they should just give up on 4.x and concentrate on Mozilla as nothing from 4.x is in Mozilla (Mozilla has a new layout engine, new front end, new everything). So NO I don't want new features in 4.x but they shouldn't up the version numbers to 4.6 to make it look like it has new features either. 4.52 is what it should be called.
Now please Netscape give up on 4.x before everyone starts looking elsewhere for their browsers. --
Re:What are Linus doing?
on
Netscape 4.6
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· Score: 1
As well as JWZ who said he thought that it was a mistake working on 4.5 rather than putting all their efforts into Mozilla 5.0 one of the developers who still works on Mozilla said the same see http://www.mozilla.org/mozilla-at-one.html
As soon as they switched to Mozilla they should have made all future releases of their product based on their open source work. When Netscape are trying to make a success of their open source efforts it makes no sense to plough all their money into a closed source effort.
And to add to your point about Linux. There are a lot more developers in the Linux community than Mozilla have got and all Linux kernels are open source so work on the 2.3 series can get integrated in the 2.2 series if the feature is too important to wait until 2.4
Put it this way: no one (well not many people) complain about Linux having both a stable and development kernel but even the Mozilla developers consider it a bad idea wasting their time on 4.x as the layout engine used in this browser is going to be replaced with NGlayout (Gecko) with the Mozilla release anyway. --
RMS wouldn't burn a complementary version of MS Office. He'd put it to good use - he'd give it to someone who was writing GPL office software to assist them in their research into their 'competitiors'. Remember RMS has nothing against using proprietary software if it is used for research into making a free equivalent. --
What are Netscape doing?
on
Netscape 4.6
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· Score: 3
It is considered one of the biggest mistakes of Netscape to have released version 4.5 of their browser instead of concentrating on Mozilla. So what do they do? They release a 4.6 version of their browser. Mozilla has a lot more potential than their current browsers so AOL/Netscape should be concentrating on getting Mozilla usable. Although 4.5 isn't perfect it's OK and is certainly usable (I don't know how people say it crashes every 5 minutes) can they not leave it alone now and put all their efforts into Mozilla and only work on the old browsers if they have to plug a security hole or something as urgent. Mozilla will never get released if they are keeping their developers on the 4.x series.
Also why 4.6? I can't see anything different to 4.5 so it should have been version 4.52 --
If anyone if willing to refute the comments made by Microsoft but needs somewhere on the web to put them then email me and I'll provide a home for it.
Then again I'm sure Rob will post it on Slashdot if you email it to him.
Whatever the case just make sure that it is published widely so everyone can see the innaccuracies in the MS argument. Publish on as many sites as you can. --
Well the obvious way to show how Linux outperforms NT is if their NT servers get slashdotted with people accessing their site.
But really, is all this benchmarking crap really worth worrying about? Linux is free. Someone who wants to try Linux can get a hold of a copy of it for free and try it out. If it doesn't meet their needs they can then go elsewhere. It's obvious that these benchmarks aren't completed fairly but who cares as long as we know the truth!
Put it this way a company that employs staff with a clue will investigate Linux (or one of the *BSD's) and probably see it suits their needs more than Windows NT. They'll then have a better solution for much less cost than the Microsoft solution. Whereas companies that employ staff that just listen to Microsoft and their paid for benchmarks will end up shelling out a fortune for sub standard software and more for the higher end hardware needed to support it. --
The fonts they used weren't exactly the easiest to read under Linux. To make it more readable you can either disable style sheets and get a standard looking font or enlarge the font to make it easier to read. --
If there's any truth in AOL supporting Linux by using it in dedicated internet boxes this should mean AOL will be giving the Mozilla project some extra support which will mean the people who were worried about AOL dropping the Mozilla project will now have nothing to be worried about. Mozilla will be the idea browser to embed into their boxes once it is complete as it is going to support the most important standards and is less bloated than the current Netscape browser (and IE which doesn't run on Linux anyway). Browsers such as kwm although quite good do not offer the standards support that Mozilla will.
--
Re:50 hours of playing with make files?!
on
NOS Crossroads
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· Score: 1
When they say makefiles they're probably not talking about makefiles. It's a bit like when they said freeware they were not really talking about freeware.
What they were probably doing is going through all the configuration files looking for things which may tweak performance. Perhaps when the did this they made a few mistakes and actually hindered performance. But I've rarely had to mess with makefiles. When compiling the kernel you do a make (x|menu)config and you shouldn't have to alter the makefiles for that, most software comes with a configure script that generates the makefiles for you, etc. The only time I've had to mess with makefiles is when I'm creating them for software that I've written.
I never noticed that particular hole in the article when reading through it quickly. --
BTW - an explanation of what I meant
on
NOS Crossroads
·
· Score: 1
When I said the article was not that bad I was talking about the things they said about Linux. I don't believe for a moment that NT could beat solaris, netware and linux. I thought I'd better clear that up. --
I don't think the article was really that bad. It acknowledged that RedHat was not the only Linux Distribution (even though that was the only one they tried) and the referred to Linux by its kernel version rather than the version of the distribution. OK it made Linux sound more difficult than it really is but lets put it this way. If you're using Linux as a network operating system you should be paying staff who know what they're doing not people who perhaps go for, lets say, NT just because it's easy for them in the short term (although they have problems later).
My main annoyance is the use of the word FREEWARE when they mean free software or open source. Freeware refers to anything free of charge - including binary only software. Linux can be freeware in a sense but can also be distributed value-added (i.e. a boxed set distribution with support and printed docs). People who hear that Linux is freeware can then be confused when they see it on sale in a shop. --
Slashdot is not specifically for Linux users, its not even just for UNIX users it's for anyone who's interested. It says: Slashdot News for Nerds. Stuff that matters
It's obvious that this stuff does matter to the person posting the question.
Yes I do know that Slashdot is mostly Linux users (I'm one myself - 100% winfree since 1996) but there's no notice when you enter the site saying - Windows users not welcome, we will not help you or take your views seriously. So if someone asks a question and we can offer help we should do so without engaging into a mighty piss take of Windows and loads of emacs r00lz and whatever. You can post this if you want but at least provide some justification for what you say.
Can I ask you what 'allows notepad support' is supposed to mean? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You seem to be implying that previous versions of MSIE didn't support sites written in Notepad. --
Even though it is still alpha it has the potential to be one of the best office suites for Linux and other UNIX platforms that KDE can run on. It seems to offer more than the commercial competition on the linux platform and it looks like it will have a feature set which will give MS Office a run for it's money. It should be fairly easy to port to Windows once it is complete (get it stable on Linux first) which would mean Microsoft would have real competition on Office as well as making the transition to Linux easier (if they're used to koffice in Windows). --
Of course when you try and get interest in the Windows community with your game don't refer to their OS as Windoze, however tempting it may be. Appear professional at all times. Show them the potential of your libraries and lets hope it gets more games to Linux. --
Rob doesn't post all articles and so some articles that people consider worthy don't make it onto slashdot. This could be becasue there was so many submissions that they had to leave some out, it wasn't considered appropriate or you've given the subject a bad title so Rob deletes it without checking it.
Remember they get loads of submissions and if they don't seem interesting immediately it's easily lost in the crap that some people probably submit. --
AS emacs is available for Windows why would you want to use notepad? It's the worlds most basic and useless text editor. No line numbering, or remembering your indentation, no support for anything other than cut, copy and paste! Well in one of my earlier submissions I think MS should include one of the better GPLed editors with Windows - as long as they include the editors source and don't use the source in their own programs there's nothing to stop them.
Just look at the excellent editors availble out of the box on a standard Linux system then look at Windows - notepad!
Then again in Linux we don't have any WYSIWYG(IYUTIB) (if you use the included browser - as HTML can look different in different browsers of with different users settings) editors for web design (except of course Netscape Composer and a few of the office apps). So we have to brag about the text editors don't we;)
But expect Linux versions of the popular web suthoring tools shortly, or if not we'll use WINE or VMware. --
It's not *that* bad! OK it's not the best tool to use for designing professional looking websites so it shouldn't be a consideration but it's OK for doing a few small quick pages and the HTML is clearly laid out so it's farily easy to modify with a text editor. It's free so what more do you want.
I used to use it a while back - not for designing web pages but for basic word processing. This was back in the days when Linux had no decent office apps and at least by saving the work in HTML meant I could take it and print ito out on any machine with a web browser on any platform.
But the reason it's not mentioned is it's not a serious alternative to the professional web design tools it would be great if someone made the new composer in mozilla an excellent cross platform open source design tool but I guess it probably won't be - it'll just be like the old one.
BTW if anyone from Netscape is reading - although the HTML generated in composer is OK it's not 100% valid. Run some code generated with composer through http://validator.w3.org/ and fix the bugs. Most are simple bugs such as not putting quotes around numbers in certain tags such as FONT SIZE=+1 instead of FONT SIZE="+1" - according toi the validator they should be there. --
Front Page - doesn't screw up you code anymore! I've heard that a few times today. Is that the best thing people can say about it! Or is it just an MS troll keep posting these messages here trying to get people to use frontpage?
Well I wouldn't use a product with a history of screwing up code becasue it shows that it comes from a company that either: doesn't care about standards, or doesn't test their products throughly I think MS falls into both of the above.
I've downloaded and installed Dreamweaver in VMware (haven't tried WINE yet - does it work?) and it works a treat. Certainly better than versions of front page that I've seen, however I've not seen FP2000, however I wouldn't buy from a company with a history of shoddy problems anyway. --
Would dreamweaver for Linux be very popular. If there are people interested in a Linux port of this software then I could set up an online petition/feasability study and see how many people are interested in the software running on the Linux platform. If you're interested in the product Macromedia do have a free trial version of dreamweaver available from their website: http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/tri al/main.cgi If you'd like to try in out in WINE or VMware or you have Windows installed or own a mac.
Personally I'd like to see some shockwave DEVELOPMENT tools for Linux (not that I'd use shockwave on the wwweb but on an Intranet that's a different matter).
I'm not sure on Macromedias attitude on Linux. They do have a (shockwave) flash plugin for Linux and Solaris versions of Netscape which works quite well but it's still at beta 1 and it's been like that for ages. Have Macromedia just quickly released support for these platforms to keep the UNIX community quiet and to say that flash is a truely multi platform format, and then not plan to develop the plugin any further. Granted, this plugin is still fairly stable for a beta, but it is not a full shockwave plugin as it doesn't support director, just flash. Also if Macromedia don't plan to develop this plugin any further newver versions of flash may not work with it in the future. Does anyone know if Macromedia are still supporting Linux/UNIX or were they not really serious in the first place. BTW you can download the flash plugin from: http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/ - -
But in the Windows world even the MS-DOS edit program is better than Notepad for editing HTML and that isn't particularly good. If you're using Windows you need to check out an alternative text editor that offers better facilities. You could try the Emacs for Win32 as I think emacs is one of the best text editors aroung for programming. There may be something better out there I don't know as I don't use Windows. But Notepad NO! It's a joke of an editor. When you think of the variety of editors on an average Linux installation and what do Microsoft give you - Notepad!
I'm sure the GPL would allow MS to include Emacs as long as they put the source to emacs on the CD too and didn't use any Emacs source in their applications. At least then they'd be a decent Editor for the Win32 platform. If they thought emacs was too difficult for their customers then they could port an open source editor similar but much more functional than notepad to Windows (e.g. NEdit). Again as long as they release the source with the CD and don't use the code in their other applications I can't see this causing any problems.
If an open source alternative to a free (as in included with Windows) application in Windows exists then why not make the most of it. It would benefit the Windows customers and it would generate a bit of good publicity for them as long as they stuck to the GPL. Of course, this is all too much to expect from them, but it would be good anyway. That's if I used Windows, but as I don't either way I don't mind. --
Re:I can't believe they pay people to write this
on
ABCNews GNOME Acticle
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· Score: 1
So if they meant no GUI like MacOS or Windows, why did they say until GNOME, the command line was the only answer. Even if some of the older Window managers didn't have very useful functionality it still provided a GUI alternative to the command line.
BTW I do know KDE and GNOME are not window managers. --
The cached version is not meant to stay up to date anyway. It's not really useful for accessing sites such as slashdot. The cached feature caches the page when it was last crawled and is meant to offer you access to the page if the site it's hosted on is down. It's not like a web caching proxy that's meant to check that it's giving out the latest version of the site (although in practice cached editions of slashdot on most proxy servers are a few hours old which is irritating enough).
What's really laughable about Rob posting this article as news is that these things used to be on Googles *front page* when google.com was just starting it's beta life, then it moved to a link off the home page - but this was ages ago. Not that I'm criticising slashdot as it's a really useful site generally. It's just this article that has been a bit strange. I bet there was a lot of more interesting submissions that didn't makeit onto the site as well.
Well I'm off now to submit an article for tomorrows Slashdot: Netscape introduces Netcenter portal site! --
Thet're an option on the last version of slackware I installed (I do a menu based installation so I select exactly what packages I select). I think they'll also be an option on RedHat too but if you select one of the standard options and don't select the files manually they may install themselves. --
Slashdot Mirror
What I mean is they should just give up on 4.x and concentrate on Mozilla as nothing from 4.x is in Mozilla (Mozilla has a new layout engine, new front end, new everything). So NO I don't want new features in 4.x but they shouldn't up the version numbers to 4.6 to make it look like it has new features either. 4.52 is what it should be called.
Now please Netscape give up on 4.x before everyone starts looking elsewhere for their browsers.
--
As well as JWZ who said he thought that it was a mistake working on 4.5 rather than putting all their efforts into Mozilla 5.0 one of the developers who still works on Mozilla said the same see http://www.mozilla.org/mozilla-at-one.html
As soon as they switched to Mozilla they should have made all future releases of their product based on their open source work. When Netscape are trying to make a success of their open source efforts it makes no sense to plough all their money into a closed source effort.
And to add to your point about Linux. There are a lot more developers in the Linux community than Mozilla have got and all Linux kernels are open source so work on the 2.3 series can get integrated in the 2.2 series if the feature is too important to wait until 2.4
Put it this way: no one (well not many people) complain about Linux having both a stable and development kernel but even the Mozilla developers consider it a bad idea wasting their time on 4.x as the layout engine used in this browser is going to be replaced with NGlayout (Gecko) with the Mozilla release anyway.
--
RMS wouldn't burn a complementary version of MS Office. He'd put it to good use - he'd give it to someone who was writing GPL office software to assist them in their research into their 'competitiors'. Remember RMS has nothing against using proprietary software if it is used for research into making a free equivalent.
--
It is considered one of the biggest mistakes of Netscape to have released version 4.5 of their browser instead of concentrating on Mozilla. So what do they do? They release a 4.6 version of their browser. Mozilla has a lot more potential than their current browsers so AOL/Netscape should be concentrating on getting Mozilla usable. Although 4.5 isn't perfect it's OK and is certainly usable (I don't know how people say it crashes every 5 minutes) can they not leave it alone now and put all their efforts into Mozilla and only work on the old browsers if they have to plug a security hole or something as urgent. Mozilla will never get released if they are keeping their developers on the 4.x series.
Also why 4.6? I can't see anything different to 4.5 so it should have been version 4.52
--
If anyone if willing to refute the comments made by Microsoft but needs somewhere on the web to put them then email me and I'll provide a home for it.
Then again I'm sure Rob will post it on Slashdot if you email it to him.
Whatever the case just make sure that it is published widely so everyone can see the innaccuracies in the MS argument. Publish on as many sites as you can.
--
Well the obvious way to show how Linux outperforms NT is if their NT servers get slashdotted with people accessing their site.
But really, is all this benchmarking crap really worth worrying about? Linux is free. Someone who wants to try Linux can get a hold of a copy of it for free and try it out. If it doesn't meet their needs they can then go elsewhere. It's obvious that these benchmarks aren't completed fairly but who cares as long as we know the truth!
Put it this way a company that employs staff with a clue will investigate Linux (or one of the *BSD's) and probably see it suits their needs more than Windows NT. They'll then have a better solution for much less cost than the Microsoft solution. Whereas companies that employ staff that just listen to Microsoft and their paid for benchmarks will end up shelling out a fortune for sub standard software and more for the higher end hardware needed to support it.
--
The fonts they used weren't exactly the easiest to read under Linux. To make it more readable you can either disable style sheets and get a standard looking font or enlarge the font to make it easier to read.
--
If there's any truth in AOL supporting Linux by using it in dedicated internet boxes this should mean AOL will be giving the Mozilla project some extra support which will mean the people who were worried about AOL dropping the Mozilla project will now have nothing to be worried about.
Mozilla will be the idea browser to embed into their boxes once it is complete as it is going to support the most important standards and is less bloated than the current Netscape browser (and IE which doesn't run on Linux anyway). Browsers such as kwm although quite good do not offer the standards support that Mozilla will.
--
When they say makefiles they're probably not talking about makefiles. It's a bit like when they said freeware they were not really talking about freeware.
What they were probably doing is going through all the configuration files looking for things which may tweak performance. Perhaps when the did this they made a few mistakes and actually hindered performance. But I've rarely had to mess with makefiles. When compiling the kernel you do a make (x|menu)config and you shouldn't have to alter the makefiles for that, most software comes with a configure script that generates the makefiles for you, etc. The only time I've had to mess with makefiles is when I'm creating them for software that I've written.
I never noticed that particular hole in the article when reading through it quickly.
--
When I said the article was not that bad I was talking about the things they said about Linux. I don't believe for a moment that NT could beat solaris, netware and linux. I thought I'd better clear that up.
--
I don't think the article was really that bad. It acknowledged that RedHat was not the only Linux Distribution (even though that was the only one they tried) and the referred to Linux by its kernel version rather than the version of the distribution. OK it made Linux sound more difficult than it really is but lets put it this way. If you're using Linux as a network operating system you should be paying staff who know what they're doing not people who perhaps go for, lets say, NT just because it's easy for them in the short term (although they have problems later).
My main annoyance is the use of the word FREEWARE when they mean free software or open source. Freeware refers to anything free of charge - including binary only software. Linux can be freeware in a sense but can also be distributed value-added (i.e. a boxed set distribution with support and printed docs). People who hear that Linux is freeware can then be confused when they see it on sale in a shop.
--
Slashdot is not specifically for Linux users, its not even just for UNIX users it's for anyone who's interested.
It says:
Slashdot
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters
It's obvious that this stuff does matter to the person posting the question.
Yes I do know that Slashdot is mostly Linux users (I'm one myself - 100% winfree since 1996) but there's no notice when you enter the site saying - Windows users not welcome, we will not help you or take your views seriously. So if someone asks a question and we can offer help we should do so without engaging into a mighty piss take of Windows and loads of emacs r00lz and whatever. You can post this if you want but at least provide some justification for what you say.
--
Can I ask you what 'allows notepad support' is supposed to mean? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You seem to be implying that previous versions of MSIE didn't support sites written in Notepad.
--
Even though it is still alpha it has the potential to be one of the best office suites for Linux and other UNIX platforms that KDE can run on. It seems to offer more than the commercial competition on the linux platform and it looks like it will have a feature set which will give MS Office a run for it's money.
It should be fairly easy to port to Windows once it is complete (get it stable on Linux first) which would mean Microsoft would have real competition on Office as well as making the transition to Linux easier (if they're used to koffice in Windows).
--
Of course when you try and get interest in the Windows community with your game don't refer to their OS as Windoze, however tempting it may be. Appear professional at all times. Show them the potential of your libraries and lets hope it gets more games to Linux.
--
Rob doesn't post all articles and so some articles that people consider worthy don't make it onto slashdot. This could be becasue there was so many submissions that they had to leave some out, it wasn't considered appropriate or you've given the subject a bad title so Rob deletes it without checking it.
Remember they get loads of submissions and if they don't seem interesting immediately it's easily lost in the crap that some people probably submit.
--
Linux- Xemacs
;)
Windows- notepad
AS emacs is available for Windows why would you want to use notepad? It's the worlds most basic and useless text editor. No line numbering, or remembering your indentation, no support for anything other than cut, copy and paste! Well in one of my earlier submissions I think MS should include one of the better GPLed editors with Windows - as long as they include the editors source and don't use the source in their own programs there's nothing to stop them.
Just look at the excellent editors availble out of the box on a standard Linux system then look at Windows - notepad!
Then again in Linux we don't have any WYSIWYG(IYUTIB) (if you use the included browser - as HTML can look different in different browsers of with different users settings) editors for web design (except of course Netscape Composer and a few of the office apps). So we have to brag about the text editors don't we
But expect Linux versions of the popular web suthoring tools shortly, or if not we'll use WINE or VMware.
--
It's not *that* bad! OK it's not the best tool to use for designing professional looking websites so it shouldn't be a consideration but it's OK for doing a few small quick pages and the HTML is clearly laid out so it's farily easy to modify with a text editor. It's free so what more do you want.
I used to use it a while back - not for designing web pages but for basic word processing. This was back in the days when Linux had no decent office apps and at least by saving the work in HTML meant I could take it and print ito out on any machine with a web browser on any platform.
But the reason it's not mentioned is it's not a serious alternative to the professional web design tools it would be great if someone made the new composer in mozilla an excellent cross platform open source design tool but I guess it probably won't be - it'll just be like the old one.
BTW if anyone from Netscape is reading - although the HTML generated in composer is OK it's not 100% valid. Run some code generated with composer through http://validator.w3.org/ and fix the bugs. Most are simple bugs such as not putting quotes around numbers in certain tags such as FONT SIZE=+1 instead of FONT SIZE="+1" - according toi the validator they should be there.
--
Front Page - doesn't screw up you code anymore! I've heard that a few times today. Is that the best thing people can say about it! Or is it just an MS troll keep posting these messages here trying to get people to use frontpage?
Well I wouldn't use a product with a history of screwing up code becasue it shows that it comes from a company that either:
doesn't care about standards, or
doesn't test their products throughly
I think MS falls into both of the above.
I've downloaded and installed Dreamweaver in VMware (haven't tried WINE yet - does it work?) and it works a treat. Certainly better than versions of front page that I've seen, however I've not seen FP2000, however I wouldn't buy from a company with a history of shoddy problems anyway.
--
Would dreamweaver for Linux be very popular. If there are people interested in a Linux port of this software then I could set up an online petition/feasability study and see how many people are interested in the software running on the Linux platform. If you're interested in the product Macromedia do have a free trial version of dreamweaver available from their website: http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/tri al/main.cgi
- -
If you'd like to try in out in WINE or VMware or you have Windows installed or own a mac.
Personally I'd like to see some shockwave DEVELOPMENT tools for Linux (not that I'd use shockwave on the wwweb but on an Intranet that's a different matter).
I'm not sure on Macromedias attitude on Linux. They do have a (shockwave) flash plugin for Linux and Solaris versions of Netscape which works quite well but it's still at beta 1 and it's been like that for ages. Have Macromedia just quickly released support for these platforms to keep the UNIX community quiet and to say that flash is a truely multi platform format, and then not plan to develop the plugin any further.
Granted, this plugin is still fairly stable for a beta, but it is not a full shockwave plugin as it doesn't support director, just flash. Also if Macromedia don't plan to develop this plugin any further newver versions of flash may not work with it in the future. Does anyone know if Macromedia are still supporting Linux/UNIX or were they not really serious in the first place.
BTW you can download the flash plugin from:
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/
But in the Windows world even the MS-DOS edit program is better than Notepad for editing HTML and that isn't particularly good. If you're using Windows you need to check out an alternative text editor that offers better facilities. You could try the Emacs for Win32 as I think emacs is one of the best text editors aroung for programming. There may be something better out there I don't know as I don't use Windows. But Notepad NO! It's a joke of an editor. When you think of the variety of editors on an average Linux installation and what do Microsoft give you - Notepad!
I'm sure the GPL would allow MS to include Emacs as long as they put the source to emacs on the CD too and didn't use any Emacs source in their applications. At least then they'd be a decent Editor for the Win32 platform. If they thought emacs was too difficult for their customers then they could port an open source editor similar but much more functional than notepad to Windows (e.g. NEdit). Again as long as they release the source with the CD and don't use the code in their other applications I can't see this causing any problems.
If an open source alternative to a free (as in included with Windows) application in Windows exists then why not make the most of it. It would benefit the Windows customers and it would generate a bit of good publicity for them as long as they stuck to the GPL. Of course, this is all too much to expect from them, but it would be good anyway.
That's if I used Windows, but as I don't either way I don't mind.
--
So if they meant no GUI like MacOS or Windows, why did they say until GNOME, the command line was the only answer. Even if some of the older Window managers didn't have very useful functionality it still provided a GUI alternative to the command line.
BTW I do know KDE and GNOME are not window managers.
--
The cached version is not meant to stay up to date anyway. It's not really useful for accessing sites such as slashdot. The cached feature caches the page when it was last crawled and is meant to offer you access to the page if the site it's hosted on is down. It's not like a web caching proxy that's meant to check that it's giving out the latest version of the site (although in practice cached editions of slashdot on most proxy servers are a few hours old which is irritating enough).
What's really laughable about Rob posting this article as news is that these things used to be on Googles *front page* when google.com was just starting it's beta life, then it moved to a link off the home page - but this was ages ago. Not that I'm criticising slashdot as it's a really useful site generally. It's just this article that has been a bit strange. I bet there was a lot of more interesting submissions that didn't makeit onto the site as well.
Well I'm off now to submit an article for tomorrows Slashdot:
Netscape introduces Netcenter portal site!
--
Thet're an option on the last version of slackware I installed (I do a menu based installation so I select exactly what packages I select). I think they'll also be an option on RedHat too but if you select one of the standard options and don't select the files manually they may install themselves.
--
When you submit a site to google it warns you that it may be a while before it crawls your site.
--