Re:"Essentially" the same data?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Hmm, you didn't provide any hardware/software specs OR timing/memory data (so others could confirm your work), but your results are nonetheless "informative". It must be because your results were in OO's favor.
I doubt the existence of this clinic. I've noticed that all these "internet addiction" or "man plays online for days straight and dies" stories come out in regular intervals and only from Asian countries. If anything, I would say that these stories are fabricated by the governments of said countries and picked up as fact by other news agencies.
It's just propaganda, nothing more. Look at the headgear that guy's got on. What purpose could it possibly serve in curing "internet addiction"? Methinks the story and the pictures serve to scare the populace from excessive computer use (assuming they actually take these stories seriously).
More correctly, people who want the content without paying the price HBO is asking! I'm not saying downloading Rome is right, just that HBO might more effectively spend their money finding a way to make the show available at a price and via a medium that the current pirates would buy.
HBO costs like $6 or $7 a month (on top of normal cable/satellite service, obviously). The current season of Rome is 12 episodes. That's three months, or roughly $20 for 12 episodes. That's less than $2 per episode. Is that not cheap enough for you?
And to make the deal even sweeter, they give you something like six additional channels that play movies nonstop. If you so much as watch one or two movies per month, HBO has already paid for itself (assuming you watch movies, of course -- $6 or $7 would cover one movie ticket or one or two rentals).
HBO's actions interfere with the operation of other people's network services. That's a computer crime, no matter what the motivation or purpose of that interference is.
Then I guess you should call the feds and complain to them that HBO is interfering with your ability to infringe upon HBO's copyright. Let me know how that works out for you.
Perhaps HBO should consider, instead of interdiction, simply giving the first few episodes away to induce subscription, that is, of course and ironically, if the show isn't too cheesy.
HBO actually did a free preview weekend about a month and a half ago. And guess what? The first two episodes of Rome were played during that free preview.
Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program.
Sounds like SOP for any massive program/OS. If you've ever been part of a truly massive product's development, you'd know what this is like. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of small groups that each specialize in a particular piece of functionality. Executives and architects determine the work items for a particular release. Responsibilities filter down the chain of command. Teams develop their work items for the release and everything is thrown together into the pot as it's done. Builds break frequently, and problems are addressed as they're encountered. Eventually testers can get their hands on decent builds, and testing/bug fixing commences during the whole process. Some ways down the road, a release finally occurs.
Really, I don't know what the executive in the article thinks should be happening. There really isn't any other way to develop programs on the scale of Windows without the aforementioned "organized chaos". It's not a text editor, it takes numerous small teams working in a coordinated manner to produce such massive piles of code. Obviously, the more teams there are, the harder perfect coordination is to achieve. Hence, things go wrong fairly frequently. This is to be expected, IMO.
Seems like a lot of people are getting worked up about how fake this all is, outraged that Slashdot accepted it as a story*, etc. But in the end, it's clearly a joke. I got a kick out of the scientists sitting on cheap plastic chairs, the minijack RAM, etc. Lighten up folks.
* That said, I have no doubt that CmdrTaco probably bought this one hook, line, and sinker and was excited to break this news.
All this in the era of cheap oil, probably well before US oil production peaked in 1971.
In the 80's, sorry. But sure, the oil was cheap I suppose.
Quarter of a million dollars is INSANELY expensive by any standard in the world, in any country. Only a US citizen during a real estate bubble can call that an inexpensive property. And I say this as a Canadian btw.
I never said it was inexpensive, just not expensive. A college-educated couple pulling down a combined $100K/year could easily afford such a house. It's also not uncommon to find houses costing half that (in the 2000 square foot range) on an acre or so of land. Very affordable housing.
And let's not talk about "insanely expensive" lest we forget that London closet converted into an apartment that cost something like $1200/month (I think it was mentioned on here or Fark some time ago). City living at its finest!
Europeans aren't running out of land, they just never tried or wanted to build a drive-in utopia of mixing country living and urban lifestyle in a single package.
Because they never had the chance. You never really approached my original question: how do you think European cities would have developed if the average European country was 20-30x its size? I also wonder how Canada might have developed if so much of it wasn't so unlivable due to cold. But even so, I think you guys have your own share of spread-out living.
European cities are still considered very desirable places to live because they boast beautiful architecture, provide lots of amenities with walkable communities and they don't permit heavy polluting industries in the core of the cities.
But any way you slice it, the living is more cramped, expensive, and noisy than outside of the city. I think, given the choice, most people would prefer to get more bang for their buck, i.e., a large house on a lot of land in a quiet neighborhood versus living in what's hopefully considered a good part of the city. The additional driving is a necessary trade-off. You're not a European, but perhaps you've always been a city dweller and are looking at this from that particular frame of reference (i.e., romanticizing the idea of city life).
You just build you country wrong. Houses take up too much room, shops are too far away from where people live, towns are built too far apart, 'zoning' etc...
And you're telling me that if your average, single European country were twenty to thirty times larger than it is now that cities wouldn't have developed differently?
Stop looking through the elitist European lens. NO ONE likes being packed into sardine cans and paying outrageous housing costs due to the inability to expand outward. If there's a lot of land to be had, dammit, people want to spread out and get away from the noise, congestion, and crime of the urban areas.
When I grew up, my family was not wealthy (not poor either), but we lived in a 3000+ square foot home on three acres of heavily wooded land with a waterfall in the backyard. And this was the norm in this neighborhood! These were not terribly expensive houses either (think $250K). It was absolutely wonderful to live in such a peaceful, relaxing environment, close to nature. Sure it was a little ways to stores and work, but it was definitely worth it.
But I wouldn't expect any of you elitist Europeans, content to spend the same amount of money on a house that's one third the size, with no backyard, in the middle of some bustling metropolis to understand the appeal of living the way I, and many Americans, have. Your countries are simply too small to support such low density living. As a result, you see everything from your particular frame of reference (i.e., "you stupid Americans should just live the way we do").
The problem with mass transit buses where I live(and I'm sure in many other places) is the requirement for routes to service every possible area in the vicinity. There's some proposed routes to the local high-tech working area, but naturally each route has to stop in a variety of places, resulting in suboptimal paths (e.g., generally requiring that the buses go into multiple cities, around the perimeter of some cities, etc.). Bear in mind that these are buses, so they're subject to sitting in the same traffic as other cars, only it'll take them longer, since they're taking a longer path. Perhaps creating numerous two-stop routes would make people more interested, but that would never happen. Let's also not forget that people will still need to drive to the bus stops. It can easily take twice as long to take a bus to work than a car. Been there, done that.
So already mass transit in most parts of the country has a strike against it, and that's just for the morning commute. But let's say you want to go to the store on Sunday, which is roughly six miles away. You could hop in your car and be there in ten minutes, or:
Hop in your car and drive the three miles to the bus stop. Five minutes. No wait, scratch that, we want to be environmentally-friendly. Bike the three miles, at a "leisurely" 20mph pace. Ten minutes.
Traffic, accidents, etc. being as unpredictable as they are, let's assume that the bus is actually on time, but you missed it by one minute. Let's also be nice and assume a bus comes by every fifteen minutes. Wait time: fifteen minutes.
The bus arrives, and you get on. The shopping center you want to go to is the third-to-last stop (and you're at the first stop; sorry, no reverse routes in this city), so you've got quite a wait ahead of you. Let's be nice and say that your bus ride is only thirty minutes.
The bus lets you off, now an HOUR after you first left home, six miles from your house. Let's also be REALLY nice and assume the bus stops exactly where you want it to, so there's no additional transportation necessary. Hope you don't need to buy too much at the grocery store, since you need to be able to carry all those bags yourself when the bus comes around again!
So let's see, in that scenario, you've taken what might have been a thirty minute trip and extended it well into two hours. Ever wonder why no one wants to use public transportation in America?
And before you say "why don't you just bike to the store?", remember that not everyone wants to bike in extreme heat, extreme cold, up a bunch of hills, is actually capable of biking that far (old people, obese people, etc.), is able to carry a large amount of groceries or a big TV on their bike, etc. Plus, the distance could just as easily have been ten, twenty, thirty miles, etc. without changing the overall public transportation commute time.
Seriously guys, in MOST of America, public transportation means buses. Almost all of the time THEY DO NOT MAKE SENSE TO USE. Too many of you think of New York City when you think of public transportation, i.e., you're no more than a block or so away from a station, the trains run like clockwork, you're let off very close to where you want to go, etc. That only works in densely populated urban areas, and most of America isn't like that!
I've used IZArc and was not that impressed with it (and this is recently, i.e., just a few weeks ago). I regularly work with ZIP archives that contain thousands of files and opening one of those files in IZArc takes _forever_, whereas Winzip is quite fast and 7zip is slightly slower, but acceptable.
Perhaps "pixel perfect" is too strong a term. What I was getting at is that differences in platforms, browser bugs, and implementation decisions ultimately determine the web experience you receive, not the standards in and of themselves. In other words, you cannot just blindly write to standards, hell, current industry standards and assume everything will work correctly.
And WRT to my distaste for Slashdotter's misguided "code to the standards!" chant, the thing that most bothers me is that what they really mean to say is "code to the standards that Firefox supports."
So don't suggest that, because there's no need. All you need to do is test your pages for standards compliance.
That's not true. You still need to test that it works in your browser.
I mean, I just wrote a webpage that includes XForms, SVG, XHTML 1.1, and SMIL. But it doesn't work right in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, or Opera! I don't get it... I wrote 100% W3C standard-compliant code, and according to Slashdot, if you just code to the standards, it'll magically work in every browser! I'm so confused!
All joking aside, I think what you meant to say is that all he needs to do is code to the standards that Firefox (or Konqueror, etc.) supports. There's a big difference between "writing to the standard" and "writing to the supported standard". Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, you cannot write 100% "standards compliant" code and expect it to magically work the second you bring it up in Firefox. It should work, most of the time. So you're wrong in saying that all this guy has to do is feed his pages through the W3C validator and be done with it.
This "code to the standards" Slashdot mantra really irks me. You guys do realize that even if you write to the standard, it's inevitable that you won't get pixel-perfect pages in every standards-compliant browser, right? Or you may run up against rendering bugs that make "100% standards compliant" pages look different from browser to browser.
Seriously guys, W3C standards are not a magic bullet. They aid interoperability, but they in no way guarantee anything about how your page will look or operate in any given browser. And the worst part about these standards are how many "should" clauses there are -- i.e., "the browser should do X if Y", which leaves lots of things up for interpretation, and incompatibility.
In summary, code to the standards as best as you can. But realize that standards support varies from browser to browser, and you'll inevitably have to provide workarounds.
If microsoft had it's way, you would only buy one console and share it with like 10 friends who all still bought games.
Uh, no. I think Microsoft would prefer that those ten friends also buy XBoxes in addition to all those games.
I don't see why so many people have such a hard time grasping this "loss leader" concept. Microsoft loses money on each console sold, which they intend to recoup by game sales. However, Microsoft loses MORE money when those consoles AREN'T bought.
It seems most Slashdotters think that the reverse is true, that Microsoft makes money when XBoxes sit on the shelf, and only lose money when an XBox is bought. Mind-boggling.
I don't think that article is saying that Monad is being dropped from Vista, but that it's being released ahead of Vista, and will still be a part of it (where previously it wouldn't be available until Vista shipped).
The most obvious thing wrong with your statement: Monad is part of the Vista beta. If it wasn't shipping with Vista, what's the point of putting it in the beta?
First, none of the other browsers are completely standards-compliant. The W3C standards are just that complicated.
Second, W3C standards are not a magic bullet. It is entirely possible that a 100% "standards compliant" browser could still render pages differently than other browsers, simply because it's the implementation of the standard that dictates the end result, not the standard itself.
Repeat after me: the standard is consistent, the implementations are not.
The way they prefer it to go is that someone contacts them secretly, tells them the hole, and they can have it fixed all up by the time the vulnerability is published.
Then they get to look super-secure, since they were "too quick" for the bad hackers.
... And this happens in the Open Source world too. Mozilla, for instance, has "classified" bugs, which are not opened up to the public until a fix (or whatever) is available. Take for instance, the Windows chrome:// bug from a few months to a year ago. They sat on it for over a year (and it was classified, of course), and didn't do anything until an exploit appeared in the wild. The fix was issued right away. "Too quick" for the hackers, indeed.
What I'm getting at is don't say that this sort of behavior is limited solely to closed source software. No one wants to have the pressure of handling a security fix WHILE an exploit is out in the wild. Would you rather have the opportunity to fix a security flaw while no one else (but the person who discovered it) knew about it, or would you prefer the person who discovered it announce it to the world and release an exploit first?
The first step when debugging rendering problems is to ensure you are complying with the specifications. You are not.
You need to realize that simply "writing to the standard" isn't a magic bullet that will guarantee flawless rendering. It is entirely possible to "write to the standard" and have Konqueror or Firefox or any other browser render the page improperly because they either don't support that particular part of the standard or have bugs with some particular part of the standard.
Since when does P2P == stealing? Some people use it for copyright infringement, yes, but I regularly use it for downloading linux isos and legal media (Art of the Saber rocks).
Sure, P2P is not inherently illegal, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think that P2P is mostly used to facilitate copyright infringement. And, as another poster pointed out, why go to these great lengths to create complicated, decentralized, and massively encrypted P2P mechanisms if what you're sharing isn't illegal?
All this means for me is that I can avoid doing too much damage to the hosting servers, which can only be a good thing for underfunded open source projects and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, you didn't provide any hardware/software specs OR timing/memory data (so others could confirm your work), but your results are nonetheless "informative". It must be because your results were in OO's favor.
I doubt the existence of this clinic. I've noticed that all these "internet addiction" or "man plays online for days straight and dies" stories come out in regular intervals and only from Asian countries. If anything, I would say that these stories are fabricated by the governments of said countries and picked up as fact by other news agencies.
It's just propaganda, nothing more. Look at the headgear that guy's got on. What purpose could it possibly serve in curing "internet addiction"? Methinks the story and the pictures serve to scare the populace from excessive computer use (assuming they actually take these stories seriously).
More correctly, people who want the content without paying the price HBO is asking! I'm not saying downloading Rome is right, just that HBO might more effectively spend their money finding a way to make the show available at a price and via a medium that the current pirates would buy.
HBO costs like $6 or $7 a month (on top of normal cable/satellite service, obviously). The current season of Rome is 12 episodes. That's three months, or roughly $20 for 12 episodes. That's less than $2 per episode. Is that not cheap enough for you?
And to make the deal even sweeter, they give you something like six additional channels that play movies nonstop. If you so much as watch one or two movies per month, HBO has already paid for itself (assuming you watch movies, of course -- $6 or $7 would cover one movie ticket or one or two rentals).
HBO's actions interfere with the operation of other people's network services. That's a computer crime, no matter what the motivation or purpose of that interference is.
Then I guess you should call the feds and complain to them that HBO is interfering with your ability to infringe upon HBO's copyright. Let me know how that works out for you.
Perhaps HBO should consider, instead of interdiction, simply giving the first few episodes away to induce subscription, that is, of course and ironically, if the show isn't too cheesy.
HBO actually did a free preview weekend about a month and a half ago. And guess what? The first two episodes of Rome were played during that free preview.
Nice try. Better luck next time.
The key word here is "if", meaning that the poster was describing a hypothetical situation.
Well, Apple "started from scratch" for the most part. I would hope they have a clean code base.
However, I don't doubt for a second that Apple's development teams face the same problems stated in the article and in my post.
Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program.
Sounds like SOP for any massive program/OS. If you've ever been part of a truly massive product's development, you'd know what this is like. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of small groups that each specialize in a particular piece of functionality. Executives and architects determine the work items for a particular release. Responsibilities filter down the chain of command. Teams develop their work items for the release and everything is thrown together into the pot as it's done. Builds break frequently, and problems are addressed as they're encountered. Eventually testers can get their hands on decent builds, and testing/bug fixing commences during the whole process. Some ways down the road, a release finally occurs.
Really, I don't know what the executive in the article thinks should be happening. There really isn't any other way to develop programs on the scale of Windows without the aforementioned "organized chaos". It's not a text editor, it takes numerous small teams working in a coordinated manner to produce such massive piles of code. Obviously, the more teams there are, the harder perfect coordination is to achieve. Hence, things go wrong fairly frequently. This is to be expected, IMO.
Seems like a lot of people are getting worked up about how fake this all is, outraged that Slashdot accepted it as a story*, etc. But in the end, it's clearly a joke. I got a kick out of the scientists sitting on cheap plastic chairs, the minijack RAM, etc. Lighten up folks.
* That said, I have no doubt that CmdrTaco probably bought this one hook, line, and sinker and was excited to break this news.
I believe it was the first time Hollywood greenlighted 2 sequels to be filmed simultaneously
What about Back to the Future 2 and 3?
Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple for Slashdot editors to check for dupes.
All this in the era of cheap oil, probably well before US oil production peaked in 1971.
In the 80's, sorry. But sure, the oil was cheap I suppose.
Quarter of a million dollars is INSANELY expensive by any standard in the world, in any country. Only a US citizen during a real estate bubble can call that an inexpensive property. And I say this as a Canadian btw.
I never said it was inexpensive, just not expensive. A college-educated couple pulling down a combined $100K/year could easily afford such a house. It's also not uncommon to find houses costing half that (in the 2000 square foot range) on an acre or so of land. Very affordable housing.
And let's not talk about "insanely expensive" lest we forget that London closet converted into an apartment that cost something like $1200/month (I think it was mentioned on here or Fark some time ago). City living at its finest!
Europeans aren't running out of land, they just never tried or wanted to build a drive-in utopia of mixing country living and urban lifestyle in a single package.
Because they never had the chance. You never really approached my original question: how do you think European cities would have developed if the average European country was 20-30x its size? I also wonder how Canada might have developed if so much of it wasn't so unlivable due to cold. But even so, I think you guys have your own share of spread-out living.
European cities are still considered very desirable places to live because they boast beautiful architecture, provide lots of amenities with walkable communities and they don't permit heavy polluting industries in the core of the cities.
But any way you slice it, the living is more cramped, expensive, and noisy than outside of the city. I think, given the choice, most people would prefer to get more bang for their buck, i.e., a large house on a lot of land in a quiet neighborhood versus living in what's hopefully considered a good part of the city. The additional driving is a necessary trade-off. You're not a European, but perhaps you've always been a city dweller and are looking at this from that particular frame of reference (i.e., romanticizing the idea of city life).
You just build you country wrong. Houses take up too much room, shops are too far away from where people live, towns are built too far apart, 'zoning' etc...
And you're telling me that if your average, single European country were twenty to thirty times larger than it is now that cities wouldn't have developed differently?
Stop looking through the elitist European lens. NO ONE likes being packed into sardine cans and paying outrageous housing costs due to the inability to expand outward. If there's a lot of land to be had, dammit, people want to spread out and get away from the noise, congestion, and crime of the urban areas.
When I grew up, my family was not wealthy (not poor either), but we lived in a 3000+ square foot home on three acres of heavily wooded land with a waterfall in the backyard. And this was the norm in this neighborhood! These were not terribly expensive houses either (think $250K). It was absolutely wonderful to live in such a peaceful, relaxing environment, close to nature. Sure it was a little ways to stores and work, but it was definitely worth it.
But I wouldn't expect any of you elitist Europeans, content to spend the same amount of money on a house that's one third the size, with no backyard, in the middle of some bustling metropolis to understand the appeal of living the way I, and many Americans, have. Your countries are simply too small to support such low density living. As a result, you see everything from your particular frame of reference (i.e., "you stupid Americans should just live the way we do").
So already mass transit in most parts of the country has a strike against it, and that's just for the morning commute. But let's say you want to go to the store on Sunday, which is roughly six miles away. You could hop in your car and be there in ten minutes, or:
So let's see, in that scenario, you've taken what might have been a thirty minute trip and extended it well into two hours. Ever wonder why no one wants to use public transportation in America?
And before you say "why don't you just bike to the store?", remember that not everyone wants to bike in extreme heat, extreme cold, up a bunch of hills, is actually capable of biking that far (old people, obese people, etc.), is able to carry a large amount of groceries or a big TV on their bike, etc. Plus, the distance could just as easily have been ten, twenty, thirty miles, etc. without changing the overall public transportation commute time.
Seriously guys, in MOST of America, public transportation means buses. Almost all of the time THEY DO NOT MAKE SENSE TO USE. Too many of you think of New York City when you think of public transportation, i.e., you're no more than a block or so away from a station, the trains run like clockwork, you're let off very close to where you want to go, etc. That only works in densely populated urban areas, and most of America isn't like that!
I've used IZArc and was not that impressed with it (and this is recently, i.e., just a few weeks ago). I regularly work with ZIP archives that contain thousands of files and opening one of those files in IZArc takes _forever_, whereas Winzip is quite fast and 7zip is slightly slower, but acceptable.
Boy, as much as you guys yell about Microsoft engaging in FUD, you have no problem making your own FUD against Microsoft.
Face it, Vista is in public beta, it's no longer years away. It's coming out in 2006. Get over it.
Perhaps "pixel perfect" is too strong a term. What I was getting at is that differences in platforms, browser bugs, and implementation decisions ultimately determine the web experience you receive, not the standards in and of themselves. In other words, you cannot just blindly write to standards, hell, current industry standards and assume everything will work correctly.
And WRT to my distaste for Slashdotter's misguided "code to the standards!" chant, the thing that most bothers me is that what they really mean to say is "code to the standards that Firefox supports."
So don't suggest that, because there's no need. All you need to do is test your pages for standards compliance.
That's not true. You still need to test that it works in your browser.
I mean, I just wrote a webpage that includes XForms, SVG, XHTML 1.1, and SMIL. But it doesn't work right in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, or Opera! I don't get it... I wrote 100% W3C standard-compliant code, and according to Slashdot, if you just code to the standards, it'll magically work in every browser! I'm so confused!
All joking aside, I think what you meant to say is that all he needs to do is code to the standards that Firefox (or Konqueror, etc.) supports. There's a big difference between "writing to the standard" and "writing to the supported standard". Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, you cannot write 100% "standards compliant" code and expect it to magically work the second you bring it up in Firefox. It should work, most of the time. So you're wrong in saying that all this guy has to do is feed his pages through the W3C validator and be done with it.
This "code to the standards" Slashdot mantra really irks me. You guys do realize that even if you write to the standard, it's inevitable that you won't get pixel-perfect pages in every standards-compliant browser, right? Or you may run up against rendering bugs that make "100% standards compliant" pages look different from browser to browser.
Seriously guys, W3C standards are not a magic bullet. They aid interoperability, but they in no way guarantee anything about how your page will look or operate in any given browser. And the worst part about these standards are how many "should" clauses there are -- i.e., "the browser should do X if Y", which leaves lots of things up for interpretation, and incompatibility.
In summary, code to the standards as best as you can. But realize that standards support varies from browser to browser, and you'll inevitably have to provide workarounds.
If microsoft had it's way, you would only buy one console and share it with like 10 friends who all still bought games.
Uh, no. I think Microsoft would prefer that those ten friends also buy XBoxes in addition to all those games.
I don't see why so many people have such a hard time grasping this "loss leader" concept. Microsoft loses money on each console sold, which they intend to recoup by game sales. However, Microsoft loses MORE money when those consoles AREN'T bought.
It seems most Slashdotters think that the reverse is true, that Microsoft makes money when XBoxes sit on the shelf, and only lose money when an XBox is bought. Mind-boggling.
I don't think that article is saying that Monad is being dropped from Vista, but that it's being released ahead of Vista, and will still be a part of it (where previously it wouldn't be available until Vista shipped).
The most obvious thing wrong with your statement: Monad is part of the Vista beta. If it wasn't shipping with Vista, what's the point of putting it in the beta?
Two things.
First, none of the other browsers are completely standards-compliant. The W3C standards are just that complicated.
Second, W3C standards are not a magic bullet. It is entirely possible that a 100% "standards compliant" browser could still render pages differently than other browsers, simply because it's the implementation of the standard that dictates the end result, not the standard itself.
Repeat after me: the standard is consistent, the implementations are not.
The way they prefer it to go is that someone contacts them secretly, tells them the hole, and they can have it fixed all up by the time the vulnerability is published.
... And this happens in the Open Source world too. Mozilla, for instance, has "classified" bugs, which are not opened up to the public until a fix (or whatever) is available. Take for instance, the Windows chrome:// bug from a few months to a year ago. They sat on it for over a year (and it was classified, of course), and didn't do anything until an exploit appeared in the wild. The fix was issued right away. "Too quick" for the hackers, indeed.
Then they get to look super-secure, since they were "too quick" for the bad hackers.
What I'm getting at is don't say that this sort of behavior is limited solely to closed source software. No one wants to have the pressure of handling a security fix WHILE an exploit is out in the wild. Would you rather have the opportunity to fix a security flaw while no one else (but the person who discovered it) knew about it, or would you prefer the person who discovered it announce it to the world and release an exploit first?
Joe Sixpack inserts his new DVD into the drive and...
"NullPointerException? WTF?"
The first step when debugging rendering problems is to ensure you are complying with the specifications. You are not.
You need to realize that simply "writing to the standard" isn't a magic bullet that will guarantee flawless rendering. It is entirely possible to "write to the standard" and have Konqueror or Firefox or any other browser render the page improperly because they either don't support that particular part of the standard or have bugs with some particular part of the standard.
Since when does P2P == stealing? Some people use it for copyright infringement, yes, but I regularly use it for downloading linux isos and legal media (Art of the Saber rocks).
Sure, P2P is not inherently illegal, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think that P2P is mostly used to facilitate copyright infringement. And, as another poster pointed out, why go to these great lengths to create complicated, decentralized, and massively encrypted P2P mechanisms if what you're sharing isn't illegal?
All this means for me is that I can avoid doing too much damage to the hosting servers, which can only be a good thing for underfunded open source projects and the like.
Ever heard of Sourceforge?