A lot of posters have commented that they belive that it's "too young" to be learning this stuff and be "shipped off" to a job. As a high school student myself (14), I really disagree.
Getting certification does not mean that one can need not go to college. However, gaining skills and then applying them, typically in a job-like setting, offers a huge set of advantages.
Internship opportunities allow you to actually _use_ these skills and do something productive with your time. Imagine if all the "14 year-old script kiddies" could put their hacking skills to use on something, whether it be Cisco routers or adding features to samba (just to name a random project). OSS gives great amounts of opportunities for students to apply their technology skills in a productive way, but this isn't enough.
Schools need to help students learn these skills and give them opportunities to use them. Would I have survived 8th grade had I not been running the lighting and sound for nearly all school productions and maintaining the school website? Probably not. Besides, it's clear that it is "fun" to crack into various systems, but what if that could be done in a productive way too? That's just what I did last week when I (at the request of the technology department) discovered that my school's security model resembles swiss cheese (I'm still trying to get them away from Windows...:(
Furthermore, there are some situations where just working on random hacking projects won't do. This is where an internship comes in handy: being able to apply your skills in some sort of useful way while learning. Here, there are no real expectations that you have to know how to do this or that, just lots of abilities to learn new things and try them out.
If anything, schools need to do more to encourage students to get involved in the field. Have students be working on something productive, whether it is building cgi scripts for the school website to working as an intern for the summer (or even for a two-week break), and you will see a group of students that are more prepared to face the world and have a thirst to learn more: exactly what is provided by a college education. You may even see a few less students smiling smugly when you discover that the school website was cracked yet again.
Many are saying "well good for them, it doesn't matter if it is secret" or "having a cheap license is the important part." However, the entire purpose of these Public-Disclosure laws is that citizens (who pay for these Universities with tax money) should have the right to know what is being done with their money. A private University can sign whatever contract they want with Microsoft, but a publicly-owner organization has an obligation to _us_ (the people paying the bill) to tell us what they are doing.
Having secret contracts with a monopoly to use taxpayer-paid dollars in unknown ways is a dangerous business. For all we know, these contracts could ablige these universities to use exchange-server or block access to filesharing networks in exchange for getting and selling their software at a low price. For that matter, it could be a high price, no-one knows!
The beauty of the public-disclosure laws comes where any citizen can complain about the use of their tax dollars.
Now wouldn't it be ironic if the prople who did this study to prove that scientists don't read articles that they cite didn't read the articles that they cite?
Part of the reason why the adoption of P3P has been so slow is that it may actually make privacy problems worse.
The problem is that users (and perl programmers) tend to be lazy. And lazy users check the little "this is the default setting so stop showing me dialog boxes" checkboxes in order to make things easier for them. The problem with this is that with P3P, a website can "claim" to not sell/rent your email address, but because the user set their default options to accept that, their address is automatically sent to the website and they don't have the opportunity to consider the implications and evaluate it themselves.
Also, P3P is a total PITA to write and the one editor that I know of (free from ibm) seems to be long since dead (and downright confusing too). It can also open companies up to legal trouble since a discrepency between a P3P file and the actual practices of the website could be grounds for a lawsuit (IANAL).
Well, slashdot.org reports that I have 3 mod points, which is just fine, but at brak.slashdot.org, I suddenly have 30! Maybe this should be fixed before the server goes production and we have people modding like mad?
Not only does jaguar have Software Base Station for AirPort, it has a built-in DHCP server/NAT router for ethernet as well (both are in the sharing preferance pane). Two check boxes are all it takes to share an internet connection over AirPort and a standard wired TCP/IP connection. Isn't the mac great?
Yes the April dev tools are availble to all free ADC online members, but not those under 18. Apple has updated their ADC license agreement with a "you must be over 18" thing added in. I'm still waiting for Apple to take away my ADC account as a 14-year-old...
I'm currently 13 years old and am an active part of the Mozilla project. I also have an Apple ADC membership, so this is my official notice to Apple: Take my ADC membership away if you want my username is zachlipton!
I realize that not everything is Apple's fault, it is just as much our legal system and our general philosophy of how we treat the next generation.
In my involvement with opensource, the only times that I have ever been descriminated against my age was http://www.advogato.org/article/331.html (a total and complete mess) and by various run-ins with child labor laws (I'll get to those in a minute).
Creating policies like this hurts opensource and kids in general. Having to lie about your age to get a Yahoo email account is stupid and pointless. I know several very gifted and talented hackers, people writing the backend code for perl6, or working to make Mozilla/Netscape Composer just a little bit better who have done an incredible service to the community.
Below is a bit of a rant on child labor laws that I wrote in October of last year:
Also, and perhaps more importantly, how do the child labor laws which were created to protect kids from being chained to looms for hours making rugs or soccer balls apply today in the real world. I can't tell you how many stories I have heard (and experienced several personally) where kids have been turned away from great experiences because of these laws. Several years ago, I was set to TA at a tech camp that my school was running during the summer, only to find that I couldn't until I was 15 and only then with a work permit. About 8-10 months ago, I got a contract offer (by email) and a possible offer of full-time work from collabnet to do work for them with the Bugzilla bug-tracking system which I am a developer with. Of course, this offer was quickly dispensed with after I told them that I was 12 years old:) These kids of life-changing experiences are being blocked from kids as a result of laws intended to prevent child labor. This isn't an issue of my family being poor and needing to sell my soul to Silicon Valley so that they can eat. This is my wanting to do and learn more, something which isn't possible with a class on a college campus on java or web design.
Internships are too rare, already struggling.com's can't afford to spend money (even though the intern is unpaid) on someone who will work mainly part-time and needs a full set of computers, software, etc and requires everyone else in the company to spend time to get the intern up to speed. Besides, who wants to hire a 13-year old? Even if they do, I don't think that they can without violating the child labor laws.
What can we do to make the opensource community and the Internet at large a place where kids are welcome? Everyone talks about making the Internet _safe_ for kids, but don't we really have to do even more than that?
MozillaQuest is quite interesting for humor, but the only thing better is http://www.mozillaquestquest.com (best viewed in a standards compliant browser like Mozilla). Watch as Patrick Casseau gives you all the news you need to know about MozillaQuest.
MathML is currently not quite ready for prime time on mac. It is being worked on and should be in a future release near you. Something the Cross-Platform nature of moz has to bend a bit to allow new features to come in sooner.
/me gets back to fixing the mozilla mac build system
I'm 13 years old and am involved in the Mozilla project and somewhat in the parrot (parrotcode.org) project as well. If you don't believe me, do a google search on my name (Zach Lipton)... I got involved with Mozilla two years ago and as they say "On the internet, no-one knows you are a dog."
Mozilla has had some exiciting work done by students (including one high school student who is 15 years old who interned at Netscape last summer) and http://www.mozilla.org/school shows that open-source as an assignment really does work.
Instead of wasting time with small example programs, simply getting involved with a project and keeping a record of what you do may be one of the best ways to really learn about software development. I am the Quality Assurence Contact for 3 components and the Owner for 2 in mozilla.org and I am able to communicate with other developers around the globe on irc.
So come on in and join the pool, many opensource projects are standing by for your patches!
As the Mozilla Tech Evangelism Qa Contact for the US region, it is my job to assist with the process of contacting sites that break in Mozilla and Netscape 6.x and helping them to fix any issues that they may have.
Before the new msn.com site went live and it was up at beta.msn.com, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104733 was filed about this problem. I filled out the MSN web feedback form asking why they were blocking Mozilla. I had already set my User-Agent string using some tools for Mozilla developers to match that of IE and found no problems whatsoever.
Shortly after posting a message on the feedback form, I got an email back (I had left my email address in the form) informing me that:
"This product is not actually a Microsoft product, so we may be unable to assist you with this. Since our Support Professionals are not trained to troubleshoot issues with Mozilla, we feel that your question would be best addressed by Mozilla's technical support."
I write back nicely informing them that I _am_ more or less Mozilla Technical Support and that I have no problems using Mozilla, etc...
Of course, a _different person_ writes me back stating that they are so sorry that they misunderstood me, but I used the wrong feedback form. They tell me I am supposted to use the feedback form I ALREADY USED!
After writing back telling them that I already used the form and asking if they could please direct this issue to the MSN webmaster group, I get another email, this time it was from the same person who emailed me telling me it was the wrong form. This email told me that they have no idea how the email got to them from that form, but that she forworded it to the appropreate department.
I sent an email a little while later thanking them for their help and asking to be kept informed of their progress. This gets me the same letter I got before, telling me to use the feedback form I used in the first place!
I then sent them an email asking them to please stop using the same form letters and to forward all of this to the msn group. I attached a complete thread of all the emails I have had back and forth with them.
I haven't heard back since. As of right now (late thursday afternoon, the time the article said it would be open), I still cannot access msn.com (mozilla build 2001101908) and get the "use ie" message.
I just wanted to keep everyone informed about what is happening to mozilla.org on the server side right now. Bugzilla has currently been shut down as a result of large amounts of database queries, etc, I have talked with those running the servers and this probably wont be up right away, but you never know. Mozillazine.org is also somewhat down (the sql server is dead), but a mirror of the article is availble at http://www.necrosys.net/mirrors/mozillazine-moz1.h tml. www.mozilla.org is still up and should continue to serve out Brendan's words of wisdom.
The problem with this system is that you end up trusting everyone in the city to supply your internet access. Can you imagine the havoc that one could cause by disconnecting the relay at their house before leaving for school on the day when the teacher "just happened" to be expecting another teacher 50 miles away to email the big final test in for that day?
If you are looking for python xpcom bindings, you might want to take a look at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/Komodo/ PyXPCOM/. Released under the Mozilla Public License.
I also know that activestate is working on bindings for perl which will be great for me!
My school used to run their entire network of 150+ macs on appletalk, one of the more brain-dead protocols around. This example proves why a ring design for a network is not always such a good idea:
Every once and a while (it felt like 5 times a day), someone would get the bright idea to pull out one end of the wire (remember, this is RJ-11) to "just see what would happen." Of course, there is one ring per floor of the building, so this means that the net connection (a whole 56k frame relay!) is out for the floor. Of course, this is when I am at 59.99mb of 60.00mb of the latest system update that I was trying to install.
I remember once when one of the teachers was having problems with her telephone and decided to pull out the RJ-11 patch cable since it looked the same and use it as a phone line to see if that was the problem (it wasn't).
Clearly there is a reason why so many major companies use star patterns for their networks. If I decide to pull the patch cable for my computer, I lose my net connection but everyone else is ok (unless my computer is the server for the whole building). You really can't expect the sysadmins to crazy-glue the network together so that one bozo can't pull the plug. Besides, this would make network administration so much harder (got that blowtorch I asked you for? I need to move this computer to another room!)
Instead of jumping through hoops to get your computer on the network and having to go into the conf. room or *gasp*, use windows, you should be evangelizing your company into spending one weekend to rewire the network into ethernet. It will be well worth it in the long term.
While this is a large issue for those involved, a good network design should not allow this to happen in the first place. If a client is sending incorrect commands to the network or is eating up the token, etc, the router should cut off that node's access to the network and the node should display an error like:
"Your system is sending inproper commands to the network and as a result, your network interface has been shut down. Please contact your system administrator for details."
Imagine how much havoc one could reek if they walked into a business with a small "network tool" that would bring down the network, plugged it into a nearby jack, and left.
When writing CGI programs for the web, the first thing you learn after how to work the #! ling is that you should NEVER TRUST THE USER. Networks need to work the same way. If the node says that it is supposted to speak now because it has the token, the router should check that the node really has the token and make adjustments to avoid bringing down the network if it does not.
Short of charging the network lines with a 5,000 volt current (and surge protecters were invented to stop even this), there should be no way that I can bring down the network from a point on the network. (Well, excluding using SNMP to shutdown the router, which assumes that I have the password, etc.)
It appears from reading the article that what they are planning on doing (they may have started already) is reciving cell phone numbers from friends and family of those missing and calling them. I would think that even if one does not answer the phone, that they can trace the route that the cell network uses to reach the phone. However, this assumes that the phone is on and was not smashed into 500 little pieces in the crash.
I would guess that it would work with wireless palm pilots such as the palm 7, etc, since those work very similar to a cell phone in this way.
The purpose of this is not to find out where everyone with a phone is, but if someone calls out from the rubble saying "I'm alive, rescue me!" they can be located. It doesn't do much good to tell the rescuers that you are alive if all you know is that you are at the bottom of a huge pile of rubble.
In my mind, one of the things that makes an opensource project stand out as "open" is that anyone can come in (even if they cannot code a line of C/C++) and help test the product. And when/if they find a bug (and it will be when in the case of many opensource projects) they can access a public bug database, enter the bug report, and have full access to what happens with that bug. In addition, anyone can come in and help to confirm
that bugs really do exist or verify that they were really fixed.
Several opensource projects that I know of actually pay developers to test the product and handle bug related tasks. Other projects will accept bug reports, but only to a black-hole email address where what is submitted may end up on a to-do list much later.
However, to have an opensource project that is truly open, anyone must be able to come in and assist with these tasks. I started with opensource software with Mozilla where I downloaded a build, thought it was pretty nifty, and then browsed http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help
to find out what I could do to help. I started confirming bugs and was welcomed into the community not by lists of rules and procedures, but by giving the privs to confirm bugs and to edit all aspects of all bugs. I am very sure that if I had not been greeted in this way, I would not be in my second year working on Mozilla where I have gone from confirming a couple of bugs to being a component owner and a qa contact for 3 componets.
Thank you very much for trying Mozilla and reporting bugs. However, this is not the right place to report a bug as there is no way to track it here with the hundreds of other comments.
Please travel over to http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helpe r.html and follow the instructions there to report bugs. Espically, please please please search for duplicates before you file a bug. After a release, the number of bugs filed jumps by huge amounts and many of these are duplicates. Please let us who are working on Mozilla work on code and not weeding out duplicate bugs.
Rather than sitting around and discussing how Mozilla should load pages 1.5ms faster than it does today, why can't we all get off the ground and help. mozilla.org has made it very easy to find the resources that you need to help out, espically with non-coding work. Yes, you did hear me say it: "You can help with Mozilla without coding!"
If you travel over to one of the following pages on mozilla.org, you can learn all that you can do to get involved. Confirming the unconfirmed (from page number 3 below) is a great way to get involved, doesn't take much time, and is of a big help when all the many bugs come in after a big release like this.
In my mind, I don't think of Mozilla or Netscape 6.x to be an upgrade to Netscape 4.x, I think of it as a completely different product. Any time that you rewrite 100% of the product, you can expect the new version to be slower, more infested with bugs, and just "feel" worse than the older version which has been tended for many years.
However, if Netscape decided not to do the 5.0 rewrite, disaster would be the only end. The old code was not mantainible and doesn't allow for the powerful new features and embedding that seamonkey allows for.
Speed is something that is being worked on and is significantly better than before. I won't mention full names here on/. without permission from the people involved, but someone at Netscape (d. hy.) did a lot of work on page loading and a new contributor did a lot of proformence work as well recently (jes.). Mail/news also uses the widget in the folder-paine, which has great speed increases as well.
So we are trying the best we can. As always, patches are welcome.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of posters have commented that they belive that it's "too young" to be learning this stuff and be "shipped off" to a job. As a high school student myself (14), I really disagree.
:(
Getting certification does not mean that one can need not go to college. However, gaining skills and then applying them, typically in a job-like setting, offers a huge set of advantages.
Internship opportunities allow you to actually _use_ these skills and do something productive with your time. Imagine if all the "14 year-old script kiddies" could put their hacking skills to use on something, whether it be Cisco routers or adding features to samba (just to name a random project). OSS gives great amounts of opportunities for students to apply their technology skills in a productive way, but this isn't enough.
Schools need to help students learn these skills and give them opportunities to use them. Would I have survived 8th grade had I not been running the lighting and sound for nearly all school productions and maintaining the school website? Probably not. Besides, it's clear that it is "fun" to crack into various systems, but what if that could be done in a productive way too? That's just what I did last week when I (at the request of the technology department) discovered that my school's security model resembles swiss cheese (I'm still trying to get them away from Windows...
Furthermore, there are some situations where just working on random hacking projects won't do. This is where an internship comes in handy: being able to apply your skills in some sort of useful way while learning. Here, there are no real expectations that you have to know how to do this or that, just lots of abilities to learn new things and try them out.
If anything, schools need to do more to encourage students to get involved in the field. Have students be working on something productive, whether it is building cgi scripts for the school website to working as an intern for the summer (or even for a two-week break), and you will see a group of students that are more prepared to face the world and have a thirst to learn more: exactly what is provided by a college education. You may even see a few less students smiling smugly when you discover that the school website was cracked yet again.
Many are saying "well good for them, it doesn't matter if it is secret" or "having a cheap license is the important part." However, the entire purpose of these Public-Disclosure laws is that citizens (who pay for these Universities with tax money) should have the right to know what is being done with their money. A private University can sign whatever contract they want with Microsoft, but a publicly-owner organization has an obligation to _us_ (the people paying the bill) to tell us what they are doing.
Having secret contracts with a monopoly to use taxpayer-paid dollars in unknown ways is a dangerous business. For all we know, these contracts could ablige these universities to use exchange-server or block access to filesharing networks in exchange for getting and selling their software at a low price. For that matter, it could be a high price, no-one knows!
The beauty of the public-disclosure laws comes where any citizen can complain about the use of their tax dollars.
Now wouldn't it be ironic if the prople who did this study to prove that scientists don't read articles that they cite didn't read the articles that they cite?
I don't usually do this, though these are pretty darn cool so I setup a mirror!
http://www.zachlipton.com/mirror/lego.htm
Zach
Part of the reason why the adoption of P3P has been so slow is that it may actually make privacy problems worse.
The problem is that users (and perl programmers) tend to be lazy. And lazy users check the little "this is the default setting so stop showing me dialog boxes" checkboxes in order to make things easier for them. The problem with this is that with P3P, a website can "claim" to not sell/rent your email address, but because the user set their default options to accept that, their address is automatically sent to the website and they don't have the opportunity to consider the implications and evaluate it themselves.
Also, P3P is a total PITA to write and the one editor that I know of (free from ibm) seems to be long since dead (and downright confusing too). It can also open companies up to legal trouble since a discrepency between a P3P file and the actual practices of the website could be grounds for a lawsuit (IANAL).
Well, slashdot.org reports that I have 3 mod points, which is just fine, but at brak.slashdot.org, I suddenly have 30! Maybe this should be fixed before the server goes production and we have people modding like mad?
Not only does jaguar have Software Base Station for AirPort, it has a built-in DHCP server/NAT router for ethernet as well (both are in the sharing preferance pane). Two check boxes are all it takes to share an internet connection over AirPort and a standard wired TCP/IP connection. Isn't the mac great?
Yes the April dev tools are availble to all free ADC online members, but not those under 18. Apple has updated their ADC license agreement with a "you must be over 18" thing added in. I'm still waiting for Apple to take away my ADC account as a 14-year-old...
I'm currently 13 years old and am an active part of the Mozilla project. I also have an Apple ADC membership, so this is my official notice to Apple: Take my ADC membership away if you want my username is zachlipton!
:) These kids of life-changing experiences are being blocked from kids as a result of laws intended to prevent child labor. This isn't an issue of my family being poor and needing to sell my soul to Silicon Valley so that they can eat. This is my wanting to do and learn more, something which isn't possible with a class on a college campus on java or web design.
.com's can't afford to spend money (even though the intern is unpaid) on someone who will work mainly part-time and needs a full set of computers, software, etc and requires everyone else in the company to spend time to get the intern up to speed. Besides, who wants to hire a 13-year old? Even if they do, I don't think that they can without violating the child labor laws.
I realize that not everything is Apple's fault, it is just as much our legal system and our general philosophy of how we treat the next generation.
In my involvement with opensource, the only times that I have ever been descriminated against my age was http://www.advogato.org/article/331.html (a total and complete mess) and by various run-ins with child labor laws (I'll get to those in a minute).
Creating policies like this hurts opensource and kids in general. Having to lie about your age to get a Yahoo email account is stupid and pointless. I know several very gifted and talented hackers, people writing the backend code for perl6, or working to make Mozilla/Netscape Composer just a little bit better who have done an incredible service to the community.
Below is a bit of a rant on child labor laws that I wrote in October of last year:
Also, and perhaps more importantly, how do the child labor laws which were created to protect kids from being chained to looms for hours making rugs or soccer balls apply today in the real world. I can't tell you how many stories I have heard (and experienced several personally) where kids have been turned away from great experiences because of these laws. Several years ago, I was set to TA at a tech camp that my school was running during the summer, only to find that I couldn't until I was 15 and only then with a work permit. About 8-10 months ago, I got a contract offer (by email) and a possible offer of full-time work from collabnet to do work for them with the Bugzilla bug-tracking system which I am a developer with. Of course, this offer was quickly dispensed with after I told them that I was 12 years old
Internships are too rare, already struggling
What can we do to make the opensource community and the Internet at large a place where kids are welcome? Everyone talks about making the Internet _safe_ for kids, but don't we really have to do even more than that?
MozillaQuest is quite interesting for humor, but the only thing better is http://www.mozillaquestquest.com (best viewed in a standards compliant browser like Mozilla). Watch as Patrick Casseau gives you all the news you need to know about MozillaQuest.
MathML is currently not quite ready for prime time on mac. It is being worked on and should be in a future release near you. Something the Cross-Platform nature of moz has to bend a bit to allow new features to come in sooner.
/me gets back to fixing the mozilla mac build system
Zach
I'm 13 years old and am involved in the Mozilla project and somewhat in the parrot (parrotcode.org) project as well. If you don't believe me, do a google search on my name (Zach Lipton)... I got involved with Mozilla two years ago and as they say "On the internet, no-one knows you are a dog."
Mozilla has had some exiciting work done by students (including one high school student who is 15 years old who interned at Netscape last summer) and http://www.mozilla.org/school shows that open-source as an assignment really does work.
Instead of wasting time with small example programs, simply getting involved with a project and keeping a record of what you do may be one of the best ways to really learn about software development. I am the Quality Assurence Contact for 3 components and the Owner for 2 in mozilla.org and I am able to communicate with other developers around the globe on irc.
So come on in and join the pool, many opensource projects are standing by for your patches!
As the Mozilla Tech Evangelism Qa Contact for the US region, it is my job to assist with the process of contacting sites that break in Mozilla and Netscape 6.x and helping them to fix any issues that they may have.
3 was filed about this problem. I filled out the MSN web feedback form asking why they were blocking Mozilla. I had already set my User-Agent string using some tools for Mozilla developers to match that of IE and found no problems whatsoever.
Before the new msn.com site went live and it was up at beta.msn.com, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10473
Shortly after posting a message on the feedback form, I got an email back (I had left my email address in the form) informing me that:
"This product is not actually a Microsoft product, so we may be unable to assist you with this. Since our Support Professionals are not trained to troubleshoot issues with Mozilla, we feel that your question would be best addressed by Mozilla's technical support."
I write back nicely informing them that I _am_ more or less Mozilla Technical Support and that I have no problems using Mozilla, etc...
Of course, a _different person_ writes me back stating that they are so sorry that they misunderstood me, but I used the wrong feedback form. They tell me I am supposted to use the feedback form I ALREADY USED!
After writing back telling them that I already used the form and asking if they could please direct this issue to the MSN webmaster group, I get another email, this time it was from the same person who emailed me telling me it was the wrong form. This email told me that they have no idea how the email got to them from that form, but that she forworded it to the appropreate department.
I sent an email a little while later thanking them for their help and asking to be kept informed of their progress. This gets me the same letter I got before, telling me to use the feedback form I used in the first place!
I then sent them an email asking them to please stop using the same form letters and to forward all of this to the msn group. I attached a complete thread of all the emails I have had back and forth with them.
I haven't heard back since. As of right now (late thursday afternoon, the time the article said it would be open), I still cannot access msn.com (mozilla build 2001101908) and get the "use ie" message.
Does Microsoft really get it?
Bugzilla is back up now, please do not overload it.
I just wanted to keep everyone informed about what is happening to mozilla.org on the server side right now. Bugzilla has currently been shut down as a result of large amounts of database queries, etc, I have talked with those running the servers and this probably wont be up right away, but you never know. Mozillazine.org is also somewhat down (the sql server is dead), but a mirror of the article is availble at http://www.necrosys.net/mirrors/mozillazine-moz1.h tml. www.mozilla.org is still up and should continue to serve out Brendan's words of wisdom.
Please stand by,
The problem with this system is that you end up trusting everyone in the city to supply your internet access. Can you imagine the havoc that one could cause by disconnecting the relay at their house before leaving for school on the day when the teacher "just happened" to be expecting another teacher 50 miles away to email the big final test in for that day?
If you are looking for python xpcom bindings, you might want to take a look at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/Komodo/ PyXPCOM/. Released under the Mozilla Public License.
I also know that activestate is working on bindings for perl which will be great for me!
My school used to run their entire network of 150+ macs on appletalk, one of the more brain-dead protocols around. This example proves why a ring design for a network is not always such a good idea:
Every once and a while (it felt like 5 times a day), someone would get the bright idea to pull out one end of the wire (remember, this is RJ-11) to "just see what would happen." Of course, there is one ring per floor of the building, so this means that the net connection (a whole 56k frame relay!) is out for the floor. Of course, this is when I am at 59.99mb of 60.00mb of the latest system update that I was trying to install.
I remember once when one of the teachers was having problems with her telephone and decided to pull out the RJ-11 patch cable since it looked the same and use it as a phone line to see if that was the problem (it wasn't).
Clearly there is a reason why so many major companies use star patterns for their networks. If I decide to pull the patch cable for my computer, I lose my net connection but everyone else is ok (unless my computer is the server for the whole building). You really can't expect the sysadmins to crazy-glue the network together so that one bozo can't pull the plug. Besides, this would make network administration so much harder (got that blowtorch I asked you for? I need to move this computer to another room!)
Instead of jumping through hoops to get your computer on the network and having to go into the conf. room or *gasp*, use windows, you should be evangelizing your company into spending one weekend to rewire the network into ethernet. It will be well worth it in the long term.
While this is a large issue for those involved, a good network design should not allow this to happen in the first place. If a client is sending incorrect commands to the network or is eating up the token, etc, the router should cut off that node's access to the network and the node should display an error like:
"Your system is sending inproper commands to the network and as a result, your network interface has been shut down. Please contact your system administrator for details."
Imagine how much havoc one could reek if they walked into a business with a small "network tool" that would bring down the network, plugged it into a nearby jack, and left.
When writing CGI programs for the web, the first thing you learn after how to work the #! ling is that you should NEVER TRUST THE USER. Networks need to work the same way. If the node says that it is supposted to speak now because it has the token, the router should check that the node really has the token and make adjustments to avoid bringing down the network if it does not.
Short of charging the network lines with a 5,000 volt current (and surge protecters were invented to stop even this), there should be no way that I can bring down the network from a point on the network. (Well, excluding using SNMP to shutdown the router, which assumes that I have the password, etc.)
It appears from reading the article that what they are planning on doing (they may have started already) is reciving cell phone numbers from friends and family of those missing and calling them. I would think that even if one does not answer the phone, that they can trace the route that the cell network uses to reach the phone. However, this assumes that the phone is on and was not smashed into 500 little pieces in the crash.
I would guess that it would work with wireless palm pilots such as the palm 7, etc, since those work very similar to a cell phone in this way.
The purpose of this is not to find out where everyone with a phone is, but if someone calls out from the rubble saying "I'm alive, rescue me!" they can be located. It doesn't do much good to tell the rescuers that you are alive if all you know is that you are at the bottom of a huge pile of rubble.
In my mind, one of the things that makes an opensource project stand out as "open" is that anyone can come in (even if they cannot code a line of C/C++) and help test the product. And when/if they find a bug (and it will be when in the case of many opensource projects) they can access a public bug database, enter the bug report, and have full access to what happens with that bug. In addition, anyone can come in and help to confirm that bugs really do exist or verify that they were really fixed.
Several opensource projects that I know of actually pay developers to test the product and handle bug related tasks. Other projects will accept bug reports, but only to a black-hole email address where what is submitted may end up on a to-do list much later.
However, to have an opensource project that is truly open, anyone must be able to come in and assist with these tasks. I started with opensource software with Mozilla where I downloaded a build, thought it was pretty nifty, and then browsed http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help to find out what I could do to help. I started confirming bugs and was welcomed into the community not by lists of rules and procedures, but by giving the privs to confirm bugs and to edit all aspects of all bugs. I am very sure that if I had not been greeted in this way, I would not be in my second year working on Mozilla where I have gone from confirming a couple of bugs to being a component owner and a qa contact for 3 componets.
Thank you very much for trying Mozilla and reporting bugs. However, this is not the right place to report a bug as there is no way to track it here with the hundreds of other comments.
e r.html and follow the instructions there to report bugs. Espically, please please please search for duplicates before you file a bug. After a release, the number of bugs filed jumps by huge amounts and many of these are duplicates. Please let us who are working on Mozilla work on code and not weeding out duplicate bugs.
Please travel over to http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-help
Thanks
If you travel over to one of the following pages on mozilla.org, you can learn all that you can do to get involved. Confirming the unconfirmed (from page number 3 below) is a great way to get involved, doesn't take much time, and is of a big help when all the many bugs come in after a big release like this.
In my mind, I don't think of Mozilla or Netscape 6.x to be an upgrade to Netscape 4.x, I think of it as a completely different product. Any time that you rewrite 100% of the product, you can expect the new version to be slower, more infested with bugs, and just "feel" worse than the older version which has been tended for many years.
/. without permission from the people involved, but someone at Netscape (d. hy.) did a lot of work on page loading and a new contributor did a lot of proformence work as well recently (jes.). Mail/news also uses the widget in the folder-paine, which has great speed increases as well.
However, if Netscape decided not to do the 5.0 rewrite, disaster would be the only end. The old code was not mantainible and doesn't allow for the powerful new features and embedding that seamonkey allows for.
Speed is something that is being worked on and is significantly better than before. I won't mention full names here on
So we are trying the best we can. As always, patches are welcome.
Zach
As you can see ladies and gentlemen, when someone triages as many bugs as I have, what number attached to a release has lost all meaning.
;)
Oh and yes, I do think that 0.9.4 is also a key step in the right direction