This is exactly why who appoints judges is so important. Conservatives have been appointing judges that are pro big business for the last 20 years or so.
The ironic thing is they also canceled MST3K which was a show that was dirt cheap to produce. I think its they just want to spew out as much drudge as possible to get enough ratings to make a profit nothing more. Nothing certainly interesting by anymeans
There was a study done a while back by one of the Skeptic groups that basically showed that the X-Files (which is extremely popular) has help popularize stuff such as UFO's, alien abduction and ESP.
Since the X-Files has come on the air belief in these psuedo science ideas has increased dramatetically.
Thats not to say its the only thing which has made this worse. Another event was the comming of the Millenium, people are highly afraid of change and the idea of the Millenium represented a huge change to a lot of people (even though it wasnt).
A lot of this is discussed in Carl Sagan's 'A Demon Haunted World' which I highly recommend reading.
Why the heck isnt this on the frontpage? Mozilla *needs* testers especially right now and were stuck in the developer section??
Especially since the articles saying Mozilla 1.0RC will be out soon was posted on the frontpage. Come on slashdot lets go!
Pax Americana - A Better Article
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 2, Informative
While the article mentioned is interesting this idea is nothing new.
Paul Kennedy, the man who wrote "The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers" has a much more interesting & Thought pervoking article then the article supplied.
"But that conclusion is almost beside the point. The larger lesson - and one stupifying to the Russian and Chinese military, worrying to the Indians, and disturbing to proponents of a common European defence policy - is that in military terms there is only one [America] player on the field that counts."
"....Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past five hundred years that I compiled in The RISE AND FALL OF The GREAT POWERS, and no other nation comes close."
I *highly* recommend people read it even if you dont agree its an interesting read.
I agree with many of the posters who say management is clueless and I agree. I also find most of "business" side of any organization often is just buzz word followers at best and at worst people who have no clue whats going on in the real world.
I have done a lot of thinking about this and other aspects of employment in this world and come to the conclusion that it doesnt matter where you are best or worst situation, if you feel your doing something worthwhile its all worth it. If your not or feel like your doing nothing to benefit either yourself or society or your dog or whoever you want to help in this world, you wont like the best of jobs.
In someways this is why i long for the days where we goto Mars or something other then just earning money because i believe thats what most of us want, to make a difference in one way or another and that reflects itself in our unhappyness in our day jobs. Whether that be unhappyness with peers or employeers or management.
Dont forget about the Interface Hall of Shame. Its great reading on what *NOT* to do with a GUI and even fun for browsing while trying to avoid doing work.
Yes they do you obviously have never worked in a corporate environment before. Many many many companies run old DOS based/Windows 3.1/95 apps for mission critical tasks because they *WORK* and they arent going to upgrade them unless they really really really have to. For MS to cut off support for security patches/ bug fixes etc for old OSs is a big deal. It costs a bunch of money to upgrade many big apps money these companies dont want to spend.
Now add onto that the new licensing practices of MS which are going to cost a bundle to these Businesses your going to start see them looking around for alternatives.
Now whether or not they switch is a different question entirely but its much more likely then say buying all new hardware for Mac OS X. Personally i dont see 2002 as a big year for Linux on the desktop but 2003, were about a years worth of development away.
Was the PDF at 2600 scanned by Monkeys?
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
Seriously is anyone else having huge problems reading the PDF from the 2600 news link? Its horrible every other word has letters missing...really odd. Anyone got a good mirror with something that is readable?
Why do people continue to post comments about how Konqueror rocks?
The people in the Mozilla work hard at developing Mozilla and we're glad that you like Konqueror but dont keep telling us this.
We continue to work at Mozilla to make it the best browser possible which it will be quite soon despite the naysayers out there. Konqueror is fine for what it does, a web browser but in a corporate environment or someone who does lots of crossplatform work (like myself) Mozilla is a godsend.
The Mozilla development cycle will *ALWAYS* be slower then Konqueror or any other browser. Why? because it compiles on almost every platform out there. It compiles on IRIX, SunOS/Solaris, Linux, *BSD, Windows, Mac, Mac OS X, BeOS, and many others.There is even a working port for QNX for godsakes.
For people who need a little help that means when you check code in, if has to compile properly on *every* platform in order for the development process to continue. This makes the process much slower. So Konqueror will develop faster as will most browsers but in the long run Mozilla will out pace them all.
What about small business that rely on DSL for there websites and connections (such as the one i work for). We had a hell of a time when Northpoint turned off the network with no warning.. Now what are we supposed to do if Covad and Rhythems go out of business?
We can't afford T1 speed or anything close to it and cable modems dont normally offer Static IPs etc?
Don't be fooled by the fact this is only a point.1 release, the improvement is vast compared with 0.9.
First up and the one most people will knowtice right away is Page Loading, the load time was cut in half at least by a checkin that occuried right after 0.9, branched.
2nd on the list of most knowticable(sp?) is the Modern theme, its great the improvement is substantial over the old one and personally I use it as my default skin now.
3rd a huge effort was put into fixing a lot of the crashers that effected 0.9 so it should crash much less (your milage may vary however)
4th: THe DDE bug was fixed (yeah!) meaning that if your on Winblows and Mozilla never did anything after you double clicked on it before with this release it should start.
5th: On Winblows you can turn on the preloader for mozilla by specifying the -turbo option. Which means that it will stay in memory like IE does thus giving you nearly instantious opening speed. (And no we havent given up on cutting down startup speed this just to get people off our back who complain that IE loads so fast and why cant Mozilla...well now you have it so stop bitching:)
Finally there is the other good stuff like LDAP support and Bidi support (multidirectional text support) (contributed by IBM btw) which makes Mozilla even more usuable and expandable.
We need help please please come to #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org and ask for some help on how to get involved. I (nick Ksosez) or the other people on there will be glad to help you. We especially need C++ coders and or Linux coders.
I believe the UI for it was checked in a couple nights ago but don't quote me on that.
Ah yes according to this Link:
5-7-1: LDAP autocomplete feature checkins happened on friday. In non-installer builds (ie.zip,.tar.gz), LDAP autocomplete works, modulo bugs, if you set the appropriate preferences.
No known regressions. Master tracking bug number for LDAP Autocomplete: 17880. The only remaining work before closing this "landing" out is to get the appropriate installer packaging tweaks checked in. Should happen today.
What has Changed & How to get Involved
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 5
The 0.9 branch is known as the performance branch (though more performance stuff is still being checked in) and to that end a lot of stuff has been rewritten for speed:
For example, Mail/News now uses Outliner which has at least doubled the speed which I use to have using Mozilla Mail/News.
Then there's PSM 2.0 which was totally rewritten from the ground up so that SSL pages are now blazzingly fast.
ImageLib (LibPr0n) also was completely rewritten so that it renders images 2x as fast as it did before.
This is not to say that this is the end of the performance fixes. In addition to the ones mentioned above, the latest nightlies have a very big speed increase loading pages (which was checked in right after 0.9 branched). In addition were working on getting the startup time down, with among other things the ability on (Winblows computers) to load Mozilla at Startup just as you would IE. bug 76004, (I know some people won't like this idea but some will, and you will have a choice)
If you want to help out you can join the channel #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org. We need Linux coders to help optimize the speed on Linux so that its just as fast as on Windows, were getting there but were still a bit behind.
A while ago I stopped b*tching about Mozilla and its slowness and decided to get involved and I have found you can make a lot of difference if you do. Even if you can't devote lots of time to it, even filing bugs, helping sort and duplicate bugs or creating testcases for those bugs is sorely needed. If you have any questions feel free to email me or check out Mozillazine.
Is it me or doesn't this create a censorship problem? The fewer the providers of service there are the easier it is for some group/government/company to censor what people see on the net.
If there comes a time in the near future where broadband access is restricted to just two choices (your cable company/Teleco provider) it seems to me that anyone who wanted to could in theory deny access to certain sites or cut off access to many people at once
For example, lets say the United States goes to war with Country A, but someone in Country A is posting a website which tells of American soldiers killing women and childen..or is just generally against the US, the Military/government could just lean on the providers to block that site. Or even better for them just cut off the network from the outside world
Don't think they would do this? Remember the Gulf War? The Media functioned primarily as a propaganda wing of the Defense Department why not the Baby Bells/Cable companies who would probably get something in return for shutting off access
This just as likely could happen with someone publishing a website detailing the environmental devistation created by a company. They could find themselves misteriously without access or worse blocked from certain providers, and in this cas all you need to do is end up on 3 or 4 block lists and no one in the US could access you.
One could argue however that people could use proxies to get around the censorship but how many people would actually do that? Not many, and many more wouldn't even know how to do it.
Maybe that wont happen but I fear we might fast be approaching the day where the Internet becomes subject to the long arm of coporate and government censorship
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone have Redhat 6.2 or Mandrake 8 RPMS? these boxes are so old the compiling of the RPMS isnt working. Thanks in advance.
See
Friends4Expo - A Rail line from Santa Monica to Downtown
Friends of the Red Line - 3rd busiest subway per passanger mile in the US
Friends of the Green Line
In short get involved and help out so we can get good public transportation in LA.
This is exactly why who appoints judges is so important. Conservatives have been appointing judges that are pro big business for the last 20 years or so.
With this being the result
The ironic thing is they also canceled MST3K which was a show that was dirt cheap to produce. I think its they just want to spew out as much drudge as possible to get enough ratings to make a profit nothing more. Nothing certainly interesting by anymeans
Wow something named FOX wasnt immediately approved by a Bush? Who would have thought it?
From Eweek:
Mozilla Impresses From All Angles
Go Mozilla go
Suddenly I have visions of Linus standing on top of mini van..ala Independence Day...saying to a crowd...
"Today we celebrate our independence day"
Obviously it has had no affect on my spelling abilities.
There was a study done a while back by one of the Skeptic groups that basically showed that the X-Files (which is extremely popular) has help popularize stuff such as UFO's, alien abduction and ESP.
Since the X-Files has come on the air belief in these psuedo science ideas has increased dramatetically.
Thats not to say its the only thing which has made this worse. Another event was the comming of the Millenium, people are highly afraid of change and the idea of the Millenium represented a huge change to a lot of people (even though it wasnt).
A lot of this is discussed in Carl Sagan's 'A Demon Haunted World' which I highly recommend reading.
Why the heck isnt this on the frontpage? Mozilla *needs* testers especially right now and were stuck in the developer section??
Especially since the articles saying Mozilla 1.0RC will be out soon was posted on the frontpage. Come on slashdot lets go!
While the article mentioned is interesting this idea is nothing new.
Paul Kennedy, the man who wrote "The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers" has a much more interesting & Thought pervoking article then the article supplied.
The article can be found here.
A quote:
"But that conclusion is almost beside the point. The larger lesson - and one stupifying to the Russian and Chinese military, worrying to the Indians, and disturbing to proponents of a common European defence policy - is that in military terms there is only one [America] player on the field that counts."
"....Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past five hundred years that I compiled in The RISE AND FALL OF The GREAT POWERS, and no other nation comes close."
I *highly* recommend people read it even if you dont agree its an interesting read.
I agree with many of the posters who say management is clueless and I agree. I also find most of "business" side of any organization often is just buzz word followers at best and at worst people who have no clue whats going on in the real world.
I have done a lot of thinking about this and other aspects of employment in this world and come to the conclusion that it doesnt matter where you are best or worst situation, if you feel your doing something worthwhile its all worth it. If your not or feel like your doing nothing to benefit either yourself or society or your dog or whoever you want to help in this world, you wont like the best of jobs.
In someways this is why i long for the days where we goto Mars or something other then just earning money because i believe thats what most of us want, to make a difference in one way or another and that reflects itself in our unhappyness in our day jobs. Whether that be unhappyness with peers or employeers or management.
Sorry bout the rambling but just my $.2.
Dont forget about the Interface Hall of Shame. Its great reading on what *NOT* to do with a GUI and even fun for browsing while trying to avoid doing work.
Yes they do you obviously have never worked in a corporate environment before. Many many many companies run old DOS based/Windows 3.1/95 apps for mission critical tasks because they *WORK* and they arent going to upgrade them unless they really really really have to. For MS to cut off support for security patches/ bug fixes etc for old OSs is a big deal. It costs a bunch of money to upgrade many big apps money these companies dont want to spend.
Now add onto that the new licensing practices of MS which are going to cost a bundle to these Businesses your going to start see them looking around for alternatives.
Now whether or not they switch is a different question entirely but its much more likely then say buying all new hardware for Mac OS X. Personally i dont see 2002 as a big year for Linux on the desktop but 2003, were about a years worth of development away.
Seriously is anyone else having huge problems reading the PDF from the 2600 news link? Its horrible every other word has letters missing...really odd. Anyone got a good mirror with something that is readable?
Why do people continue to post comments about how Konqueror rocks?
The people in the Mozilla work hard at developing Mozilla and we're glad that you like Konqueror but dont keep telling us this.
We continue to work at Mozilla to make it the best browser possible which it will be quite soon despite the naysayers out there. Konqueror is fine for what it does, a web browser but in a corporate environment or someone who does lots of crossplatform work (like myself) Mozilla is a godsend.
The Mozilla development cycle will *ALWAYS* be slower then Konqueror or any other browser. Why? because it compiles on almost every platform out there. It compiles on IRIX, SunOS/Solaris, Linux, *BSD, Windows, Mac, Mac OS X, BeOS, and many others.There is even a working port for QNX for godsakes.
For people who need a little help that means when you check code in, if has to compile properly on *every* platform in order for the development process to continue. This makes the process much slower. So Konqueror will develop faster as will most browsers but in the long run Mozilla will out pace them all.
What about small business that rely on DSL for there websites and connections (such as the one i work for). We had a hell of a time when Northpoint turned off the network with no warning.. Now what are we supposed to do if Covad and Rhythems go out of business?
We can't afford T1 speed or anything close to it and cable modems dont normally offer Static IPs etc?
Guess were SOL.
Another one: LONDO: It's like being nibbled to death by.. - Vir, what are those Earth creatures called, waddle, big bill, go quack?
VIR: (thinks) Cats.
LONDO: It's like being nibbled to death by cats.
Lando: "I hate my life"
:)
G'Kar: "So Do I"
God I can't wait for more Babylon 5 it was the best Sci-Fi Series Ever..bar none.
Don't be fooled by the fact this is only a point .1 release, the improvement is vast compared with 0.9.
:)
First up and the one most people will knowtice right away is Page Loading, the load time was cut in half at least by a checkin that occuried right after 0.9, branched.
2nd on the list of most knowticable(sp?) is the Modern theme, its great the improvement is substantial over the old one and personally I use it as my default skin now.
3rd a huge effort was put into fixing a lot of the crashers that effected 0.9 so it should crash much less (your milage may vary however)
4th: THe DDE bug was fixed (yeah!) meaning that if your on Winblows and Mozilla never did anything after you double clicked on it before with this release it should start.
5th: On Winblows you can turn on the preloader for mozilla by specifying the -turbo option. Which means that it will stay in memory like IE does thus giving you nearly instantious opening speed. (And no we havent given up on cutting down startup speed this just to get people off our back who complain that IE loads so fast and why cant Mozilla...well now you have it so stop bitching
Finally there is the other good stuff like LDAP support and Bidi support (multidirectional text support) (contributed by IBM btw) which makes Mozilla even more usuable and expandable.
We need help please please come to #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org and ask for some help on how to get involved. I (nick Ksosez) or the other people on there will be glad to help you. We especially need C++ coders and or Linux coders.
Enjoy the release
-Ksosez
LDAP support is going to be in 0.9.1.
.zip, .tar.gz), LDAP autocomplete works, modulo bugs, if you set the appropriate preferences.
I believe the UI for it was checked in a couple nights ago but don't quote me on that.
Ah yes according to this Link:
5-7-1: LDAP autocomplete feature checkins happened on friday. In non-installer builds (ie
No known regressions. Master tracking bug number for LDAP Autocomplete: 17880. The only remaining work before closing this "landing" out is to get the appropriate installer packaging tweaks checked in. Should happen today.
The 0.9 branch is known as the performance branch (though more performance stuff is still being checked in) and to that end a lot of stuff has been rewritten for speed: For example, Mail/News now uses Outliner which has at least doubled the speed which I use to have using Mozilla Mail/News. Then there's PSM 2.0 which was totally rewritten from the ground up so that SSL pages are now blazzingly fast. ImageLib (LibPr0n) also was completely rewritten so that it renders images 2x as fast as it did before. This is not to say that this is the end of the performance fixes. In addition to the ones mentioned above, the latest nightlies have a very big speed increase loading pages (which was checked in right after 0.9 branched). In addition were working on getting the startup time down, with among other things the ability on (Winblows computers) to load Mozilla at Startup just as you would IE. bug 76004, (I know some people won't like this idea but some will, and you will have a choice) If you want to help out you can join the channel #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org. We need Linux coders to help optimize the speed on Linux so that its just as fast as on Windows, were getting there but were still a bit behind. A while ago I stopped b*tching about Mozilla and its slowness and decided to get involved and I have found you can make a lot of difference if you do. Even if you can't devote lots of time to it, even filing bugs, helping sort and duplicate bugs or creating testcases for those bugs is sorely needed. If you have any questions feel free to email me or check out Mozillazine.
Is it me or doesn't this create a censorship problem? The fewer the providers of service there are the easier it is for some group/government/company to censor what people see on the net.
If there comes a time in the near future where broadband access is restricted to just two choices (your cable company/Teleco provider) it seems to me that anyone who wanted to could in theory deny access to certain sites or cut off access to many people at once
For example, lets say the United States goes to war with Country A, but someone in Country A is posting a website which tells of American soldiers killing women and childen..or is just generally against the US, the Military/government could just lean on the providers to block that site. Or even better for them just cut off the network from the outside world
Don't think they would do this? Remember the Gulf War? The Media functioned primarily as a propaganda wing of the Defense Department why not the Baby Bells/Cable companies who would probably get something in return for shutting off access
This just as likely could happen with someone publishing a website detailing the environmental devistation created by a company. They could find themselves misteriously without access or worse blocked from certain providers, and in this cas all you need to do is end up on 3 or 4 block lists and no one in the US could access you.
One could argue however that people could use proxies to get around the censorship but how many people would actually do that? Not many, and many more wouldn't even know how to do it.
Maybe that wont happen but I fear we might fast be approaching the day where the Internet becomes subject to the long arm of coporate and government censorship