> One benefit of the small downloader is that you
> don't have to download EVERYTHING and then only
> install a few parts.
That is exactly what the NS6 installer provides: it downloads only the components you need. The original poster is complaining that it downloads them separately instead of all at once.
> won't be using NS6 until (1) the bugs are mostly
> out (2) its mozilla and (3) I can get rid of the
> sidebar, integrated IM and other add-ons i don't
> need.
PSM *is* open source. If you can't find binaries for your platform, that's just because no-one's built it for that platform yet and making binaries available.
Netscape has NOT "forked" from Mozilla. What they did was to *branch* temporarily from the Mozilla trunk so they could work on stability, documentation etc without worrying about the constantly changing trunk. During this process they fell a bit behind the trunk, which was expected and necessary.
Future (major) Netscape releases will be done the same way --- they will branch from the then-current Mozilla trunk, stabilise, and ship. Every good thing in Mozilla (except possibly some features that Netscape choose to deliberately exclude) will find its way into the next major Netscape release.
Mozilla will continue as an open source project WITH Netscape's engineers. Future releases of Netscape will be based off later versions of Mozilla.
In particular, this means that all the bug fixes and improvements in Mozilla that didn't make NS6.0 *will* eventually appear in a future Netscape release.
Mac IE 5.5 standards compliance is pretty good, maybe better than Mozilla right now. But the fact is that most people use Win IE 5.5, which is significantly worse than Mozilla. This is according to independent sites like richinstyle.com.
As soon as Netscape 6 is released, a huge number of pending bug fixes and new features that are currently waiting to be checked into the Mozilla trunk will be checked in. (This is already happening actually.) Let them stabilise for about a month, and then Netscape management --- if they want to --- can cut another branch and release Netscape 6.1 after another month or two of QA.
So Netscape could, if they want to, release a much improved 6.1 within three months of NS 6.0. Of course, I have no idea what their actual plans are.
> For example, while Linux has module interfaces
> for supporting different file systems, there's
> no way you can load a module for a real-time
> scheduler.
There is no way for a microkernel to plug in a module for real-time scheduling unless it is designed to allow different schedulers to be plugged in. The fact that "it's a microkernel" doesn't make everything magically pluggable.
No matter what kind of kernel you've got, you can plug things in if and only if the kernel designers built in the right hooks and interfaces for the functionality you're trying to plug in. Whether the plugging in is implemented with kernel modules or user-level servers is largely irrelevant.
(User-level servers can be more robust and may require less privilege, but very few people care about that.)
Other companies poured money into Mach too, including Intel (for their supercomputers) and KSR (I think). Guess what --- all those projects are dead. Except for Next, I guess, which lives on in OS X.
When I arrived here at CMU in '94, there was a joke going around that Mach was destroying everything it touched. (We'd abandoned it by then, heheh.)
The reason microkernels are unfashionable and people have abandoned them is because, by and large, they suck. Note that there are in fact much better microkernels out there, such as IBM's L5 and K42 (both open source, I think). The big picture is that in 99% of cases, people either don't need the extensibility, or a Linux-style kernel module is good enough. It's just not worth engineering for the other 1%. After ten years of trying to find alternative extensible OS technologies that don't suck, the OS research community has mostly realized this fact, and extensible OS research is dying.
> for a deeply scientific person, it must be "I am
> almost certain there is a God."
I'm a Christian, and I'd say that. Any honest person has to admit the possibility of error in anything they say.
But it gets pretty inconvenient to always say things like "I believe in the existence of Linus Torvalds with probability 99.9999%" or whatever. So we simplify things and say "I believe in the existence of Linus Torvalds." The approximation is good enough to live by.
It's not about cultural differences. I agree that most missionaries these days are quite sensitive to that.
However, I've met a lot of people, Christian and not, who think that *any* dogmatic statement of the form "I think you are mistaken and here's why" is "insulting and degrading" when applied to certain subjects, such as "religion". The problem is that if someone thinks that a statement is insulting or degrading, then it is, and it's self-defeating to try to persuade them otherwise.
So I think any self-respecting missionary, no matter how sensitive, will eventually have to say something potentially insulting or degrading, and inevitably some people will feel insulted or degraded.
But basically, I just wish Christians, atheists, and everyone else would be a bit less touchy about having their beliefs questioned. Especially Christians. "Always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that you have" is not acceptably satisfied by "Back off man, don't degrade my beliefs."
Not at all. By jumping out to the multiverse, you may be able to explain why this universe improbably supports life, but you need accept no such obligations regarding the multiverse. (Well, hopefully. It depends on what kind of multiverse you come up with.)
Same goes with God substituted for the multiverse.
The idea that life on earth came from outer space is far inferior, because it induces exactly the same kind of question that it tries to explain.
> One without evidence, of course, which is where
> faith comes in
Here, and everywhere else in this thread, and in most of the rest of the world, people use the word "faith" in a different way to the way Bible translators, educated Christians and theologians use it. For example, consider Hebrews 11. Most of those "people of faith" had actually experienced God directly and had direct evidence of his existence and his intentions. Their faith is commended because they continued to trust and obey God in spite of oppressive circumstances. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" has a more thorough discussion of this.
In a similar way, some people have enough faith to ride rollercoasters and others (including myself) don't.
Hmm, perhaps it's time for Christians to stop using the word "faith".
Ireland had the benefit of billions of dollars worth of support from the EU, which let them cut taxes and increase spending. That money came from the richer EU nations --- like Germany.
An AOL-on-Linux box would come preinstalled and need not ever drop the user down to a command line. It could be more like a Tivo. They don't seem to have problems supporting Linux --- because the user never even realizes that they're using Linux.
Microsoft wants to destroy AOL just as much as they want to destroy every other serious competitor. But they signed a deal with AOL where AOL keeps using IE (and hence keeps IE's market share up) in return for AOL having their client on the Win9x desktop. MS sees that as a win for now, but that could change anytime.
AOL could easily twist the arms of Macromedia and Real to keep their plugins up to date on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
> Did any of the compliance bugs named in
> Flanagan's petition to postpone the release get
> fixed before the final release?
No. NS6 went to manufacturing almost immediately after that showed up.
> One benefit of the small downloader is that you
> don't have to download EVERYTHING and then only
> install a few parts.
That is exactly what the NS6 installer provides: it downloads only the components you need. The original poster is complaining that it downloads them separately instead of all at once.
> won't be using NS6 until (1) the bugs are mostly
> out (2) its mozilla and (3) I can get rid of the
> sidebar, integrated IM and other add-ons i don't
> need.
So use Mozilla.
Someone else would pick it up.
A lot of companies don't want to cede total control of the Web to Microsoft.
PSM *is* open source. If you can't find binaries for your platform, that's just because no-one's built it for that platform yet and making binaries available.
You have the source. Just find a friendly FreeBSD hacker to build it for you.
Now that NS6.0 is out you can stop talking about the 4.x series. NS6.0 is far from perfect but it's much better than 4.x in many respects.
PS, with NS6.0 and Mozilla you can use user style sheets to easily get rid of all images.
Netscape has NOT "forked" from Mozilla. What they did was to *branch* temporarily from the Mozilla trunk so they could work on stability, documentation etc without worrying about the constantly changing trunk. During this process they fell a bit behind the trunk, which was expected and necessary.
Future (major) Netscape releases will be done the same way --- they will branch from the then-current Mozilla trunk, stabilise, and ship. Every good thing in Mozilla (except possibly some features that Netscape choose to deliberately exclude) will find its way into the next major Netscape release.
Mozilla will continue as an open source project WITH Netscape's engineers. Future releases of Netscape will be based off later versions of Mozilla.
In particular, this means that all the bug fixes and improvements in Mozilla that didn't make NS6.0 *will* eventually appear in a future Netscape release.
Mac IE 5.5 standards compliance is pretty good, maybe better than Mozilla right now. But the fact is that most people use Win IE 5.5, which is significantly worse than Mozilla. This is according to independent sites like richinstyle.com.
As soon as Netscape 6 is released, a huge number of pending bug fixes and new features that are currently waiting to be checked into the Mozilla trunk will be checked in. (This is already happening actually.) Let them stabilise for about a month, and then Netscape management --- if they want to --- can cut another branch and release Netscape 6.1 after another month or two of QA.
So Netscape could, if they want to, release a much improved 6.1 within three months of NS 6.0. Of course, I have no idea what their actual plans are.
No, Netscape 6 will benefit as soon as Netscape 6.1 comes out.
Netscape 6's CSS support is more standards-compliant than anything else on the market, with the possible exception of IE 5.5 on the Mac.
NT is not a microkernel OS. There is a HUGE amount of code running in kernel space, much more than (say) Linux.
> microkernel modules can be anything
WRONG. This is classic microkernel propaganda.
> For example, while Linux has module interfaces
> for supporting different file systems, there's
> no way you can load a module for a real-time
> scheduler.
There is no way for a microkernel to plug in a module for real-time scheduling unless it is designed to allow different schedulers to be plugged in. The fact that "it's a microkernel" doesn't make everything magically pluggable.
No matter what kind of kernel you've got, you can plug things in if and only if the kernel designers built in the right hooks and interfaces for the functionality you're trying to plug in. Whether the plugging in is implemented with kernel modules or user-level servers is largely irrelevant.
(User-level servers can be more robust and may require less privilege, but very few people care about that.)
Mach was developed on RISC machines (IBM RTs, then MIPS). Microkernel performance sucked.
Other companies poured money into Mach too, including Intel (for their supercomputers) and KSR (I think). Guess what --- all those projects are dead. Except for Next, I guess, which lives on in OS X.
When I arrived here at CMU in '94, there was a joke going around that Mach was destroying everything it touched. (We'd abandoned it by then, heheh.)
The reason microkernels are unfashionable and people have abandoned them is because, by and large, they suck. Note that there are in fact much better microkernels out there, such as IBM's L5 and K42 (both open source, I think). The big picture is that in 99% of cases, people either don't need the extensibility, or a Linux-style kernel module is good enough. It's just not worth engineering for the other 1%. After ten years of trying to find alternative extensible OS technologies that don't suck, the OS research community has mostly realized this fact, and extensible OS research is dying.
You're talking about Hebrews 11.
PS, no more excuses about not having a Bible:
http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?
> for a deeply scientific person, it must be "I am
> almost certain there is a God."
I'm a Christian, and I'd say that. Any honest person has to admit the possibility of error in anything they say.
But it gets pretty inconvenient to always say things like "I believe in the existence of Linus Torvalds with probability 99.9999%" or whatever. So we simplify things and say "I believe in the existence of Linus Torvalds." The approximation is good enough to live by.
It's not about cultural differences. I agree that most missionaries these days are quite sensitive to that.
However, I've met a lot of people, Christian and not, who think that *any* dogmatic statement of the form "I think you are mistaken and here's why" is "insulting and degrading" when applied to certain subjects, such as "religion". The problem is that if someone thinks that a statement is insulting or degrading, then it is, and it's self-defeating to try to persuade them otherwise.
So I think any self-respecting missionary, no matter how sensitive, will eventually have to say something potentially insulting or degrading, and inevitably some people will feel insulted or degraded.
But basically, I just wish Christians, atheists, and everyone else would be a bit less touchy about having their beliefs questioned. Especially Christians. "Always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that you have" is not acceptably satisfied by "Back off man, don't degrade my beliefs."
Not at all. By jumping out to the multiverse, you may be able to explain why this universe improbably supports life, but you need accept no such obligations regarding the multiverse. (Well, hopefully. It depends on what kind of multiverse you come up with.)
Same goes with God substituted for the multiverse.
The idea that life on earth came from outer space is far inferior, because it induces exactly the same kind of question that it tries to explain.
> You insult and degrade the beliefs of a large
> portion of the population,
Nothing wrong with that. If that was wrong, we'd have to disavow the efforts of most Christian missionaries.
It's more important to be right than popular.
> One without evidence, of course, which is where
> faith comes in
Here, and everywhere else in this thread, and in most of the rest of the world, people use the word "faith" in a different way to the way Bible translators, educated Christians and theologians use it. For example, consider Hebrews 11. Most of those "people of faith" had actually experienced God directly and had direct evidence of his existence and his intentions. Their faith is commended because they continued to trust and obey God in spite of oppressive circumstances. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" has a more thorough discussion of this.
In a similar way, some people have enough faith to ride rollercoasters and others (including myself) don't.
Hmm, perhaps it's time for Christians to stop using the word "faith".
Ireland had the benefit of billions of dollars worth of support from the EU, which let them cut taxes and increase spending. That money came from the richer EU nations --- like Germany.
IBM has also released their K42 OS kernel under the LGPL.
An AOL-on-Linux box would come preinstalled and need not ever drop the user down to a command line. It could be more like a Tivo. They don't seem to have problems supporting Linux --- because the user never even realizes that they're using Linux.
Microsoft wants to destroy AOL just as much as they want to destroy every other serious competitor. But they signed a deal with AOL where AOL keeps using IE (and hence keeps IE's market share up) in return for AOL having their client on the Win9x desktop. MS sees that as a win for now, but that could change anytime.
AOL could easily twist the arms of Macromedia and Real to keep their plugins up to date on Linux.