Well you'll never get true randomness but I used to notice this in mp3 playing software a lot of times particularly winamp seemed to play some tracks a lot more than others when on random.
On Linux I used to use a command line player and a nice structure of directories and symlinks to make the playlists and never used to bother with random.
Now I do most of my work on a Mac, but I also happen to listen to music less now, so random is now random enough for me.
Anyway, slow news day of what, this is the second pointless ipod story I read today on here:)
I like ipods, I have one but only ever use it on long journeys and no I don't have DRM'd tracks so I didn't care about online music purchases. The ipod just happened to be the one that worked the best (scrollwheel is nice and quick) and having a mac I knew it'd work well.
on the other hand we have browsers like Epiphany and Firefox which have extensions that add single easily moved buttons, search plugins or menu items (and hardly ever toolbars!).
It's worth also pointing out that some of the better designed toolbar extensions for Firefox such as the Google toolbar allow you to use ordinary firefox toolbar customisation so you can drag buttons off the Google toolbar onto other Firefox toolbars and hide the Google toolbar if you don't need it.
I do this so I can put the page rank indicator next to the throbber in the menubar and I put the search results back/forward button next to the built in firefox search bar and then hide the rest of the toolbar.
This certainly beats IE7's customisability. I remember back before Firefox people were complaining Mozilla's toolbar customisation was terrible and should be more like IE's. With Firefox it improved beyond IE6 and now in IE7 customisation is almost non existent.
and this Mail is totally unrelated to that rather awful rag the Daily Mail (whose Sunday version is called the Mail on Sunday as opposed to this one that's the Sunday Mail).
The Sunday Mail is a scottish paper.
We have a few oddly named papers in the UK. The Sunday Sun is a local sunday newspaper for Newcastle area and has no relation to Rupert Murdoch's The Sun (their Sunday version is News of the World).
I just thought I'd clear that up for anyone who seen 'Mail' and was wondering why the style was different to what you'd expect from the Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail is probably best to be avoided at all costs, at least if you want reliable news, as is The Sun! Although the Sun is aimed at working class and the Daily Mail is aimed at middle class and tried to convince their readers that anyone whose not middle class is low life scum that should be locked up.
And Europe is getting a bit tired of Microsoft's attitude. These guys in Redmond know damn well what is required to get a smooth introduction of their software in Europe, and unlike at home it can't be bought in a court or congress.
I don't know about that. The EU have shown recently that they're willing to bend over for the US government, look at the recent story about EU handing over airline passenger data to the US (they have been doing it for a while but the EU courts decided it was illegal so they renegotiated with the US and in reality what we got was a system that's really identical).
Basically a US company may not get any special treatment in the EU but if it drags on long enough MS just have to spend enough cash to buy a few corrupt EU politicians and then lobby the US to put pressure on the EU.
Another delay won't matter one bit, it's been delayed enough already that I'm sure any computer manufacturers already have contingency plans made in case the release is not ready. Also as businesses are generally slow adopters (many still run Win2k) not many will be waiting for that release (I don't understand why they're releasing to corporates first and then consumers, it's eather ready or it's not).
As is the case with many of you, I'm not going to be queueing outside in the rain waiting for the first store with vista in to open (well I'd be crazy to I use OS X and Linux at home and Linux and Windows at work and I'm not going to pay to upgrade a work machine!), all the interesting features from the product were cut so it looses whatever geek appeal an MS product can ever have so now it's probably best that they make sure they deliver the most polished product they can possibly do.
Things have changed a lot since the XP launch days, now Mac OS X is a very mature product and as Macs are Intel now some people may buy a Mac so that they can hedge their bets and run either Vista or OSX depending on what they prefer, a rushed and unpolished Vista would really make the Mac shine. Also there's a lot more user focus on the Linux desktop such as ubuntu, not to mention Live CD's which are a great way for people to try out Linux with no risk - although live CD's are not new, I remember a Slackware CD from 1996 that you could run from, but these days they're a whole lot more user friendly with decent hardware detection.
I was guilty of just reading the summary and comments there and when I read them my immediate thought was 'MozillaQuest style reporting' so that's what I started writing about. Anyway, the report is just as flawed when you talk about code analysis. With free software you can analyse any of the code out there without permission, whereas with proprietary software you need to be given access to the code in the first place and then you'd have to be given permission to publish the results of the analysis. I mean there's not going to be any company that's going to hand over their code for analysis and then allow the results to be published without them vetting it first.
So basically any source code examined on the commercial side will have been done with full approval so in that instance it's still invalid comparison.
However, I do believe that automated source code analysis is a good idea as part of a strategy of producing solid code, but of course it should only be an addition to rather than a replacement of other quality control measures.
He's comparing "bugs" in a project such as Apache with "bugs" in the software controlling a jet engine on an airplane.
He refuses to accept that different projects have different requirements. When the project results in people dying if it fails, you spend a LOT more money and time finding all the "bugs".
Yeah, back in the day a failure in apache could result in loss of life if you were the sysadmin for a.com company back in 2000 and the webserver died just as the CEO was showing some potential investors the site.
We'll have to wait for artists to realise they can do better off by bypassing the RIAA before we see that thing happening.
In general people will pay for something that they like, they're only going to avoid paying for something if the price makes it worth the hassle to get something for free, so yes not everyone would pay for music if it was not DRM encumbered (but those people don't pay now anyway) but those who could afford it would pay for it if three conditions are met:
They know a fair share supports the artist
Available in an unrestricted format that by default just about any player supports such as MP3 (so average user will know it PlaysForSure(TM)) and preferably an option for people who know what they're doing to download in another format (at least offer a lossless option)
They're able to pay for it - the topic of this discussion
People will pay for convenience if the price is right (otherwise people wouldn't use allofmp3.com when you could get it free elsewhere), and the three points above would convince people that paying for songs was the right thing to do.
However, these days you're not paying for convenience, you're paying for extra hassle. Buy a track online from a 'legal' store - DRM ridden, may not PlayForSure(TM) on your brand of player. Buy a legal DVD be treated to a bit you can't fast forward through telling you why piracy is bad. But Genuine Windows (TM) and have to put up with activation, in all these cases the bootleg copies are less hassle.
Firefox is an excellent example of something that is given away free but can make money out of its supporters. They got hundreds of thousands of dollars donations from users to run an ad in the New York Times, they get regular donations from supporters - no one forced people to donate but because they appreciated the software they were willing to. So why wouldn't the same people be willing to pay to download music from their favourite artists if they knew that the money would be going to them.
What the heck kind of payment processor doesn't do both Visa and Mastercard? I bet they're losing a non-zero amount of business due to this stupidity.
No amex either:)
It seems odd that it's like that on allofmp3. Perhaps in Russia MC has higher fees that Visa. Most countries though seem to lump Visa and MC together so there's no real difference what card you have, they're both accepted equally.
In the UK, a retailer who wants to start accepting cards usually is offered the following:
Debit cards only - Maestro (Switch), Visa Debit (Delta), Solo, Electron. These are the cheapest to accept
Credit + Debit cards - as above + Visa and MC
Then the merchant is free to add Amex and other more expensive to process cards to their system should they choose. I try to use Amex when possible because their rewards are better but I do understand why merchants may not want to accept it.
I hate reports like this, there's so many reasons that bug counts don't prove anything. This all reminds me of the times MozillaQuest used to delight in posting Mozilla bug counts as a measure of quality (now MozillaQuest doesn't seem to mention Mozilla anymore, but a good parody of their Mozilla reporting is here).
Now these days you often get studies claiming that proprietary software is less buggy than free software, but it misses some very significant points, the ones we used to respond to MozillaQuest articles still apply very much to today:
Free software projects very often have an open bug database so it's easy to see how many open bugs are in a project, most proprietary software doesn't have an open bug database so you have to trust the manufacturer and your own testing
Not all bugs in open databases are really bugs. Some are requests for enhancement, some are duplicates and some are rants
In some cases one persons bug may be another persons feature (e.g. if an application does something differently to the platform guidelines, some people may like this alternative behaviour, others will consider it a bug).
The profit motive - companies have a lot to lose by letting people know about bugs, volunteer led projects tend to want people to know about bugs in the hope someone will help fix them (this is getting a bit blurred now that more and more organisations are making money off free software but the fact still is with proprietary software you can't fix the bugs so they gain nothing by telling you about them)
Sorry if this is redundant, I'm working on call at the moment and was halfway through typing this when I had some work to do!
In the end the poster may not be 100% factually correct but it's still exceedingly worrying that they're trying to pass laws that allow some forms of what almost anyone would describe as torture and of course not having access to a fair trial.
There's a lot in the UK that don't seem to care what their allies in the US are doing (so I can imagine a lot of people in the US don't care either). They don't care because it's not directly affecting them. If that weird looking foreign guy that gets on the bus every morning with them suddenly disappears then they don't care what happens to him, it's all the price to pay for their safety. Once these laws start affecting more people then we may see more complaints.
Yes I know the UK regularly has largish anti-war demonstrations but that's still a very small portion of the population. Most people over here seem to think Bush is an idiot and are glad Blair is standing down but most people here don't care enough to make a difference.
That is indeed worrying that they're continuing down this path. The right to free speech is important, but the right to a fair trial is even more so - why is so much money and time being spent on the trial of Saddam when there's a lot of possibily innocent people rotting away in a US naval base in Cuba (great way to show the Cubans that the US way is better than Castro!). Torture of course should never be used in a civilised society but I can imagine it's a lot more widespread than just the US and its allies.
The US can never hold a moral highground anymore over anything. Land of the free? No you can't even walk through airport security without risking getting detained because they don't like what you're wearing or a slogan on your bag.
Setting a good example to others? No way. Threats to nuke Iran if they continue their nuclear programme seem very hypocritical. Their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan were so badly organised the US probably killed more innocent citizens than the terrorists did in 11/09/2001 and 7/7/2005 combined.
Also governments need to move religion out of politics, currently Bush loves bringing God into everything he can, this makes him as much of a religious extremist as the muslim extremists he's fighting.
I'm fed up with the UK too, but perhaps when Blair quits his replacement may not be such a Bush puppet - but I doubt we'll be as lucky. The UK in recent history have always had the special relationship with the US.
Best thing to do is make sure pages work in IE6 and earlier, but if they don't look as good or are lacking some non essential feature you can put a link to other browsers that do work better. As long as you give the use a choice and don't intentionally cripple them by locking them into one browser.
You can download nightly builds of Firefox from the trunk (branded as Minefield to indicate use at your own risk) so you can see exactly how Firefox 3.0 is progressing. As for IE8 we can't see the current status of that so who knows how much work is left to be done on IE8?
For updates on thr trunk (which will become Fx3.0) see The Burning Edge
Yes it still behaves that way, it's basically an improved version of the IE6 engine, better CSS support, but nowhere near the level of their competitors.
I wonder if they will ever reach the level of their competitors without doing a total rewrite of their rendering engine. As we seen from Mozilla rewriting a rendering engine takes time, the gecko engine now used by Firefox debuted in Netscape 6, it took many years to get into shape.
This is not the same IE build as in the latest Vista build. This release only works in XP. Actually the versions of IE in XP and Vista are not exactly the same. Some of this they blame on the underlying OS but most likely it's just to make vista more attractive.
IE for Vista was going to be named IE7+ and XP simply IE7, however they scrapped that naming convention.
Also another slight name change, on both platforms it's no longer "Microsoft Internet Explorer" it's now "Windows Internet Explorer".
On a related note in a tainted and statistically useless sample (ie, mostly Slashdot users) even Mac users can be tempted from Safari it seems - so why everyone assumes that on the release of IE 7 Firefox market share is going to die I have no idea.
I definitely don't think IE7 will significantly hurt Firefox usage. Look at it this way:
IE7 is not available for Win2000 or earlier (or and non-Win OS)
IE7 user interface is totally non-standard on XP
IE7's installation is more of a hassle than Firefox - it's a larger download, needs rebooting and takes longer
Firefox 2.0 won't pass the Acid test because the rendering engine in 2.0 is based on the same gecko as 1.5 (1.5 uses Gecko 1.8 and 2.0 uses 1.8.1), however Firefox 3.0 should pass the acid test because a lot of work has been done on the rendering engine (Gecko 1.9).
Basically most of the changes in Firefox 2.0 will be in the frontend, 3.0 will have a lot of improvements to the backend.
However, 2.0's CSS support is vastly superior to that in IE7.
Apparently they've already written the roadmap for the next two versions of IE (probably called 7.5 and 8.0) so they're probably going to just make security patches for 7.0 and then fix bugs, improve compliance and add features in the future releases.
Not much as been said on these future releases yet except that they're hard at work on them.
No, they said from the beginning that IE7 would not pass the ACID2 test. Maybe in a later release.
They neglected the browser for years (not the IE devs fault but management decision) so it'll take a long time to get upto speed with the rest.
One thing that we must make sure NEVER happens is that IE gets as dominant as it was pre-Firefox otherwise they'll just stop IE development again. It's happened once, it can just happen again. Fortunately, despite the hard work of the IE team, there's still a lot of benefits to be gained from using Firefox or Opera (or Safari, etc)
As long as these games perform well on Intel macs this can only be a good thing as games are different to other applications.
With games then they're usually full screen and you see none of the usual OS user interface and so a game does not need a Mac look and feel like for example a word processing application.
So for apps an approach like this would be bad, imagine companies stop producing their mac apps because they could easily port over using something like winelib then you'd lose the mac experience, but for games it does not matter as they don't follow platform conventions anyway.
NO Mention of source code
on
World Firefox Day
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There's no mention at all on the world Firefox day website that the names will be listed in the source. From what I can see this'll just be a link to a site that lists the names (probably accessible from the 'about' box). So there'll be no bloat to the source, not even as a comment.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you'll never get true randomness but I used to notice this in mp3 playing software a lot of times particularly winamp seemed to play some tracks a lot more than others when on random.
:)
On Linux I used to use a command line player and a nice structure of directories and symlinks to make the playlists and never used to bother with random.
Now I do most of my work on a Mac, but I also happen to listen to music less now, so random is now random enough for me.
Anyway, slow news day of what, this is the second pointless ipod story I read today on here
I like ipods, I have one but only ever use it on long journeys and no I don't have DRM'd tracks so I didn't care about online music purchases. The ipod just happened to be the one that worked the best (scrollwheel is nice and quick) and having a mac I knew it'd work well.
It's worth also pointing out that some of the better designed toolbar extensions for Firefox such as the Google toolbar allow you to use ordinary firefox toolbar customisation so you can drag buttons off the Google toolbar onto other Firefox toolbars and hide the Google toolbar if you don't need it.
I do this so I can put the page rank indicator next to the throbber in the menubar and I put the search results back/forward button next to the built in firefox search bar and then hide the rest of the toolbar.
This certainly beats IE7's customisability. I remember back before Firefox people were complaining Mozilla's toolbar customisation was terrible and should be more like IE's. With Firefox it improved beyond IE6 and now in IE7 customisation is almost non existent.
and this Mail is totally unrelated to that rather awful rag the Daily Mail (whose Sunday version is called the Mail on Sunday as opposed to this one that's the Sunday Mail).
The Sunday Mail is a scottish paper.
We have a few oddly named papers in the UK. The Sunday Sun is a local sunday newspaper for Newcastle area and has no relation to Rupert Murdoch's The Sun (their Sunday version is News of the World).
I just thought I'd clear that up for anyone who seen 'Mail' and was wondering why the style was different to what you'd expect from the Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail is probably best to be avoided at all costs, at least if you want reliable news, as is The Sun! Although the Sun is aimed at working class and the Daily Mail is aimed at middle class and tried to convince their readers that anyone whose not middle class is low life scum that should be locked up.
Yeah, that's why they used OR and not XOR
I don't know about that. The EU have shown recently that they're willing to bend over for the US government, look at the recent story about EU handing over airline passenger data to the US (they have been doing it for a while but the EU courts decided it was illegal so they renegotiated with the US and in reality what we got was a system that's really identical).
Basically a US company may not get any special treatment in the EU but if it drags on long enough MS just have to spend enough cash to buy a few corrupt EU politicians and then lobby the US to put pressure on the EU.
Another delay won't matter one bit, it's been delayed enough already that I'm sure any computer manufacturers already have contingency plans made in case the release is not ready. Also as businesses are generally slow adopters (many still run Win2k) not many will be waiting for that release (I don't understand why they're releasing to corporates first and then consumers, it's eather ready or it's not).
As is the case with many of you, I'm not going to be queueing outside in the rain waiting for the first store with vista in to open (well I'd be crazy to I use OS X and Linux at home and Linux and Windows at work and I'm not going to pay to upgrade a work machine!), all the interesting features from the product were cut so it looses whatever geek appeal an MS product can ever have so now it's probably best that they make sure they deliver the most polished product they can possibly do.
Things have changed a lot since the XP launch days, now Mac OS X is a very mature product and as Macs are Intel now some people may buy a Mac so that they can hedge their bets and run either Vista or OSX depending on what they prefer, a rushed and unpolished Vista would really make the Mac shine. Also there's a lot more user focus on the Linux desktop such as ubuntu, not to mention Live CD's which are a great way for people to try out Linux with no risk - although live CD's are not new, I remember a Slackware CD from 1996 that you could run from, but these days they're a whole lot more user friendly with decent hardware detection.
I was guilty of just reading the summary and comments there and when I read them my immediate thought was 'MozillaQuest style reporting' so that's what I started writing about. Anyway, the report is just as flawed when you talk about code analysis. With free software you can analyse any of the code out there without permission, whereas with proprietary software you need to be given access to the code in the first place and then you'd have to be given permission to publish the results of the analysis. I mean there's not going to be any company that's going to hand over their code for analysis and then allow the results to be published without them vetting it first.
So basically any source code examined on the commercial side will have been done with full approval so in that instance it's still invalid comparison.
However, I do believe that automated source code analysis is a good idea as part of a strategy of producing solid code, but of course it should only be an addition to rather than a replacement of other quality control measures.
He refuses to accept that different projects have different requirements. When the project results in people dying if it fails, you spend a LOT more money and time finding all the "bugs".
Yeah, back in the day a failure in apache could result in loss of life if you were the sysadmin for a .com company back in 2000 and the webserver died just as the CEO was showing some potential investors the site.
I miss those money for nothing days :)
In general people will pay for something that they like, they're only going to avoid paying for something if the price makes it worth the hassle to get something for free, so yes not everyone would pay for music if it was not DRM encumbered (but those people don't pay now anyway) but those who could afford it would pay for it if three conditions are met:
- They know a fair share supports the artist
- Available in an unrestricted format that by default just about any player supports such as MP3 (so average user will know it PlaysForSure(TM)) and preferably an option for people who know what they're doing to download in another format (at least offer a lossless option)
- They're able to pay for it - the topic of this discussion
People will pay for convenience if the price is right (otherwise people wouldn't use allofmp3.com when you could get it free elsewhere), and the three points above would convince people that paying for songs was the right thing to do.However, these days you're not paying for convenience, you're paying for extra hassle. Buy a track online from a 'legal' store - DRM ridden, may not PlayForSure(TM) on your brand of player. Buy a legal DVD be treated to a bit you can't fast forward through telling you why piracy is bad. But Genuine Windows (TM) and have to put up with activation, in all these cases the bootleg copies are less hassle.
Firefox is an excellent example of something that is given away free but can make money out of its supporters. They got hundreds of thousands of dollars donations from users to run an ad in the New York Times, they get regular donations from supporters - no one forced people to donate but because they appreciated the software they were willing to. So why wouldn't the same people be willing to pay to download music from their favourite artists if they knew that the money would be going to them.
No amex either :)
It seems odd that it's like that on allofmp3. Perhaps in Russia MC has higher fees that Visa. Most countries though seem to lump Visa and MC together so there's no real difference what card you have, they're both accepted equally.
In the UK, a retailer who wants to start accepting cards usually is offered the following:
- Debit cards only - Maestro (Switch), Visa Debit (Delta), Solo, Electron. These are the cheapest to accept
- Credit + Debit cards - as above + Visa and MC
Then the merchant is free to add Amex and other more expensive to process cards to their system should they choose. I try to use Amex when possible because their rewards are better but I do understand why merchants may not want to accept it.Now these days you often get studies claiming that proprietary software is less buggy than free software, but it misses some very significant points, the ones we used to respond to MozillaQuest articles still apply very much to today:
- Free software projects very often have an open bug database so it's easy to see how many open bugs are in a project, most proprietary software doesn't have an open bug database so you have to trust the manufacturer and your own testing
- Not all bugs in open databases are really bugs. Some are requests for enhancement, some are duplicates and some are rants
- In some cases one persons bug may be another persons feature (e.g. if an application does something differently to the platform guidelines, some people may like this alternative behaviour, others will consider it a bug).
- The profit motive - companies have a lot to lose by letting people know about bugs, volunteer led projects tend to want people to know about bugs in the hope someone will help fix them (this is getting a bit blurred now that more and more organisations are making money off free software but the fact still is with proprietary software you can't fix the bugs so they gain nothing by telling you about them)
Sorry if this is redundant, I'm working on call at the moment and was halfway through typing this when I had some work to do!In the end the poster may not be 100% factually correct but it's still exceedingly worrying that they're trying to pass laws that allow some forms of what almost anyone would describe as torture and of course not having access to a fair trial.
There's a lot in the UK that don't seem to care what their allies in the US are doing (so I can imagine a lot of people in the US don't care either). They don't care because it's not directly affecting them. If that weird looking foreign guy that gets on the bus every morning with them suddenly disappears then they don't care what happens to him, it's all the price to pay for their safety. Once these laws start affecting more people then we may see more complaints.
Yes I know the UK regularly has largish anti-war demonstrations but that's still a very small portion of the population. Most people over here seem to think Bush is an idiot and are glad Blair is standing down but most people here don't care enough to make a difference.
I suspect it's the same in the US.
That is indeed worrying that they're continuing down this path. The right to free speech is important, but the right to a fair trial is even more so - why is so much money and time being spent on the trial of Saddam when there's a lot of possibily innocent people rotting away in a US naval base in Cuba (great way to show the Cubans that the US way is better than Castro!). Torture of course should never be used in a civilised society but I can imagine it's a lot more widespread than just the US and its allies.
The US can never hold a moral highground anymore over anything. Land of the free? No you can't even walk through airport security without risking getting detained because they don't like what you're wearing or a slogan on your bag.
Setting a good example to others? No way. Threats to nuke Iran if they continue their nuclear programme seem very hypocritical. Their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan were so badly organised the US probably killed more innocent citizens than the terrorists did in 11/09/2001 and 7/7/2005 combined.
Also governments need to move religion out of politics, currently Bush loves bringing God into everything he can, this makes him as much of a religious extremist as the muslim extremists he's fighting.
I'm fed up with the UK too, but perhaps when Blair quits his replacement may not be such a Bush puppet - but I doubt we'll be as lucky. The UK in recent history have always had the special relationship with the US.
Best thing to do is make sure pages work in IE6 and earlier, but if they don't look as good or are lacking some non essential feature you can put a link to other browsers that do work better. As long as you give the use a choice and don't intentionally cripple them by locking them into one browser.
You can download nightly builds of Firefox from the trunk (branded as Minefield to indicate use at your own risk) so you can see exactly how Firefox 3.0 is progressing. As for IE8 we can't see the current status of that so who knows how much work is left to be done on IE8?
For updates on thr trunk (which will become Fx3.0) see The Burning Edge
Not just GUI some of the security related features too, but yes, mshtml (the rendering engine) should be the same on XP and vista
Yes it still behaves that way, it's basically an improved version of the IE6 engine, better CSS support, but nowhere near the level of their competitors.
I wonder if they will ever reach the level of their competitors without doing a total rewrite of their rendering engine. As we seen from Mozilla rewriting a rendering engine takes time, the gecko engine now used by Firefox debuted in Netscape 6, it took many years to get into shape.
This is not the same IE build as in the latest Vista build. This release only works in XP. Actually the versions of IE in XP and Vista are not exactly the same. Some of this they blame on the underlying OS but most likely it's just to make vista more attractive.
IE for Vista was going to be named IE7+ and XP simply IE7, however they scrapped that naming convention.
Also another slight name change, on both platforms it's no longer "Microsoft Internet Explorer" it's now "Windows Internet Explorer".
I definitely don't think IE7 will significantly hurt Firefox usage. Look at it this way:
Firefox 2.0 won't pass the Acid test because the rendering engine in 2.0 is based on the same gecko as 1.5 (1.5 uses Gecko 1.8 and 2.0 uses 1.8.1), however Firefox 3.0 should pass the acid test because a lot of work has been done on the rendering engine (Gecko 1.9).
Basically most of the changes in Firefox 2.0 will be in the frontend, 3.0 will have a lot of improvements to the backend.
However, 2.0's CSS support is vastly superior to that in IE7.
Apparently they've already written the roadmap for the next two versions of IE (probably called 7.5 and 8.0) so they're probably going to just make security patches for 7.0 and then fix bugs, improve compliance and add features in the future releases.
Not much as been said on these future releases yet except that they're hard at work on them.
No, they said from the beginning that IE7 would not pass the ACID2 test. Maybe in a later release.
They neglected the browser for years (not the IE devs fault but management decision) so it'll take a long time to get upto speed with the rest.
One thing that we must make sure NEVER happens is that IE gets as dominant as it was pre-Firefox otherwise they'll just stop IE development again. It's happened once, it can just happen again. Fortunately, despite the hard work of the IE team, there's still a lot of benefits to be gained from using Firefox or Opera (or Safari, etc)
Well x64 sounds bad enough but now they're referring to the 32bit x86 architecture as x32. Just doesn't sound right.
As long as these games perform well on Intel macs this can only be a good thing as games are different to other applications.
With games then they're usually full screen and you see none of the usual OS user interface and so a game does not need a Mac look and feel like for example a word processing application.
So for apps an approach like this would be bad, imagine companies stop producing their mac apps because they could easily port over using something like winelib then you'd lose the mac experience, but for games it does not matter as they don't follow platform conventions anyway.
There's no mention at all on the world Firefox day website that the names will be listed in the source. From what I can see this'll just be a link to a site that lists the names (probably accessible from the 'about' box). So there'll be no bloat to the source, not even as a comment.