I love Firefox's plugins, and all the great features it has even without plugins. But it's getting pretty annoying to have to nuke my profile and reinstall all my themes/plugins of choice every time I install a new release or nightly build of FF... yeah, sometimes it doesn't break anything, but usually even 1 day's difference manages to break an extension or two, or completely mangle my profile.
I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since Firefox is still beta software, but it would be nice if they could at least make old extensions and themes not completely crash/freeze the browser. On my system, having an old theme or extension installed is usually good enough to make Firefox crash or freeze at startup.
If the milestone releases were stable enough for everyday use, that'd probably make it easier. But every firefox/firebird/etc milestone I've used has had showstopper bugs that drove me to the nightly builds. 0.8 for example has a cache corruption bug (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12366 2) that I'm able to reproduce on every machine I use Firefox on - and it's a serious pain. However, the first nightly that fixes that bug introduces two severe rendering bugs (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24285 6, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242691 ), plus a bug that breaks forms on sites like PayPal (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24270 9).
I think it would be really good if the Firefox devs could backport bug fixes to the milestone releases, so that it would be possible to get a very stable version of Firefox, even if it's missing some of the shiny new features. Right now I'm stuck using a nightly that doesn't support almost any of the extensions I use, and still has a bunch of bugs that weren't in 0.8, just so I can browse the web without feeling like I'm using a crippled version of IE.
Another solution would be to just settle on a standardized plugin API and stick with it, so that extensions and plugins don't break in bizarre ways every time a new nightly comes out. I'm not sure how realistic that idea is, though, based on how complex the Mozilla/Gecko/XPCOM framework is.
Basically, I love Firefox, and I loved plain Mozilla before Firefox came out, but they're both way too unpredictable. It would be nice if something could be done to 'settle them down' a little bit. Even now Firefox randomly crashes while I'm loading various pages, and exhibits lots of funky little behaviors I'm just getting used to, and I can reproduce all this on other machines. Nuking my profile and installing the latest Firefox nightly is becoming a daily affair for me. All this maintenance is nearly enough to send me back to IE.
I don't really see how this is anything new. Everybody should know that light only travels at about 186,000 miles per second, so of course it's not going to reach us right away...
So this whole 'looking into the past' thing is just a stupid way of saying that the telescopes can see really far.
I guess if you can dupe the less-educated parts of the US population into thinking that the Hubble is a time machine, though, maybe they'll bitch at NASA and make sure the Hubble gets maintained for the next twenty years! That'd be good.
On the Van Helsing movie site's front page, only one link actually goes to the movie's page. There's links for a video game, a cartoon, repackaged versions of old monster movies, and even Van Helsing merchandise.
If shitty advertisements disguised as films are the best Hollywood can put out, it's no wonder they need the video game industry. I'll take an Enix or Blizzard (well, make that ArenaNet) game over another Matrix sequel any day.
One would think that since XAML is built into Longhorn, it will run faster than the open-source equivalent. Kind of like using Aqua/Carbon/whatever for Camino's interface...
There's a chance you'll see.NET for Mac if MS releases a version of Office based on.NET. Not very likely, but possible.
Though, really, why does it matter? Apple doesn't release a version of Mac OS X for x86, so you can't run OS X software on x86, just like Microsoft isn't releasing a version of.NET for OS X. That doesn't mean that the platform is useless.
If you really want an application that fits into your workflow nicely and cooperates with all the other software on your PC, at least for now, platform-independent solutions like.NET and Java are not the answer. A Java or.NET app is still not going to feel 100% like a native app on every platform, even if you throw some pretty skins on it - there are too many differences. For example, for the longest time the Mac OS had no standard equivalent to Windows' ComboBox, so developers rolled their own. I'm not even sure if OS X has an equivalent. Mac UIs have always been designed somewhat differently than their Windows counterparts, based on that reason and other reasons.
When Microsoft finally bites the dust or finally changes its business model to adapt to the times (when, not if), that won't be anything to worry about. And all those.NET-specific XML files will still be plain text, easy enough to read and convert... which means people stuck with legacy.NET techology and software won't be stuck. They'll have a relatively easy way to move away from that technology.
C# and the.NET CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) are ECMA standards, which, IIRC, means RAND (reasonable and non-discrimnatory) licensing of all applicable patents/copyrights/diseases related to them is guaranteed. I believe that's what the Mono project is doing most of its work from, most of the MS-specific stuff like WinForms is in a seperate part of the project that isn't required for it to work.
I really look forward to seeing a day when you can take almost any modern application and run it on pretty much any machine. Now that Microsoft is moving over to a platform-independent, bytecode-based system for most of their applications (well, at least Longhorn) and are encouraging their developers to do so, that day seems to be getting closer.
It's also slightly encouraging to see Microsoft adopting the use of technology like XML and moving a bit closer to standards with their software... their new vector language is very similar to SVG, and their new forms design language is XML-based. Both seem to be pretty clean and generally simple, which means that at least theoretically it would be possible to convert these formats to truly open formats, and to open them easily in open-source software. It would be really cool to be able to just convert a Windows-oriented XAML file to a Linux-friendly format and then run the associated.NET code with no changes on Fedora or SuSE.
The fact that Mono even runs on mobile platforms is nice, because in my opinion J2ME is one of the most horrible APIs I have ever had the misfortune of using - some solid competition for J2ME is definitely needed in the mobile sector, and I think a solid platform based on Linux and Mono might be able to deliver. There are already plenty of.NET developers out there, and being able to share a codebase between Linux, Windows, and PDAs would probably be a pretty convincing benefit. Sure, there's the.NET Compact Framework, but that basically only works on the most recent versions of WinCE.
Say hello to IKVM!. It works with Mono and MS's.Net implementation, and has already been demonstrated running full-fledged Java applications like Eclipse, along with translating between aspects of the Java and.NET world. It's a very cool project, and I look forward to seeing it completed.
Virtual Desktop support has actually been in the OS since Win2k, if I remember right. It's done using some of the same functionality they use for Fast User Switching, Remote Desktop, and Terminal Server... they just make use of it differently.
That or it's a cheap hack that keeps track of window locations and shows/hides them quickly. You never can tell with MS, sometimes they implement stuff with dirty hacks just because they can.:)
Eiffel? Why bother? There is a much better language out there that's already being used heavily on the GNOME platform, along with other platforms like KDE.
What language, you ask?
English!
English is an easy-to-learn and powerful language. A large number of developers already know this language, and there are many tools available to translate it to/from other languages.
English is a robust and mature language, as well. It's been in use for hundreds of years and its capabilities are well-known and understood by many. Try and match that with some ten-year-old language created by hairy UNIX administrators!
Compilers and documentation for English are easy to get a copy of, and many are completely free or very affordable. Almost every college out there offers courses in English.
There are many powerful IDEs available for English - OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, the list goes on.
Unlike languages like Java and French, there is no central committee that says what English can and cannot 'do'. You're free to explore the potential of the language and come up with new instructions and invent new ways to use existing instructions.
I honestly cannot believe that English has been overlooked in this debate. It's a perfect fit for GNOME.
He's not talking about a scripting language. He's talking about offering a consistent, usable way of scripting almost any command-line or GUI application. VB and AppleScript can work with both GUI & Command Line apps, along with entire OO frameworks. I'm not aware of any easy ways to do all that in sh/csh/bash.
If I want to copy a list of filenames from the web browser to the clipboard, and then feed them to a command line ZIP compressor, and then burn that ZIP to a CD, could I do all that easily using sh/csh/bash? I could probably do it in a few minutes using VB, and I'm sure AppleScript would be equally easy (if not easier).
What I find funny is that the same stuff you see in the Looking Glass demonstration videos was demonstrated in a Microsoft Research project a few years back.
I'd show you the proof, but as far as I can tell Microsoft dumped the project (and for good reason, it wasn't really an improvement in usability at all... it was just pretty.)
Dunno. I've never been a big fan of the idea of 3D interfaces, so maybe I'm just a naysayer.
So on OS X, if I download a SWF file or a HTML file with embedded JScript, or visit a page with a Java applet in it, I won't be able to execute any of the scripting code embedded in those files unless I copy them to my hard disk and set an execute flag?
Saying that forcing users to enable an Execution Flag on files before you can run them, is a 'security feature' is ignorant. There are plenty of plain file formats that can contain executable code in them, and an 'execute flag' doesn't do anything to solve that problem. All it does is inconvenience users. Word Macro Viruses were plenty effective even though you couldn't double-click a Word file and run it just like an EXE file.
How was iTunes innovative? I guess the fact that Apple did a good job writing a music player is worthy of mention, but it's hardly innovative for Apple to take someone else's idea and do a nice job at porting it to the Mac.
Simply chatting with someone can be a problem.
on
ICQ Universe
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· Score: 5, Interesting
A few years back, during the eFront Fiasco, someone got a hold of ICQ Chat Logs off of the machine of Sam Jain, the CEO of eFront. I was an administrator of one of the sites that got hit hard by the scandal, and if my memory serves the chat logs (which included a lot of very embarassing things being said by Sam and other higher-ups at eFront) were one of the big things that resulted in eFront's eventual destruction.
I can only imagine how much worse it will get when ICQ expands its services.
Slashdot Mirror
I love Firefox's plugins, and all the great features it has even without plugins. But it's getting pretty annoying to have to nuke my profile and reinstall all my themes/plugins of choice every time I install a new release or nightly build of FF... yeah, sometimes it doesn't break anything, but usually even 1 day's difference manages to break an extension or two, or completely mangle my profile.
6 2) that I'm able to reproduce on every machine I use Firefox on - and it's a serious pain. However, the first nightly that fixes that bug introduces two severe rendering bugs (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24285 6, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242691 ), plus a bug that breaks forms on sites like PayPal (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24270 9).
I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since Firefox is still beta software, but it would be nice if they could at least make old extensions and themes not completely crash/freeze the browser. On my system, having an old theme or extension installed is usually good enough to make Firefox crash or freeze at startup.
If the milestone releases were stable enough for everyday use, that'd probably make it easier. But every firefox/firebird/etc milestone I've used has had showstopper bugs that drove me to the nightly builds. 0.8 for example has a cache corruption bug (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1236
I think it would be really good if the Firefox devs could backport bug fixes to the milestone releases, so that it would be possible to get a very stable version of Firefox, even if it's missing some of the shiny new features. Right now I'm stuck using a nightly that doesn't support almost any of the extensions I use, and still has a bunch of bugs that weren't in 0.8, just so I can browse the web without feeling like I'm using a crippled version of IE.
Another solution would be to just settle on a standardized plugin API and stick with it, so that extensions and plugins don't break in bizarre ways every time a new nightly comes out. I'm not sure how realistic that idea is, though, based on how complex the Mozilla/Gecko/XPCOM framework is.
Basically, I love Firefox, and I loved plain Mozilla before Firefox came out, but they're both way too unpredictable. It would be nice if something could be done to 'settle them down' a little bit. Even now Firefox randomly crashes while I'm loading various pages, and exhibits lots of funky little behaviors I'm just getting used to, and I can reproduce all this on other machines. Nuking my profile and installing the latest Firefox nightly is becoming a daily affair for me. All this maintenance is nearly enough to send me back to IE.
I don't really see how this is anything new. Everybody should know that light only travels at about 186,000 miles per second, so of course it's not going to reach us right away...
So this whole 'looking into the past' thing is just a stupid way of saying that the telescopes can see really far.
I guess if you can dupe the less-educated parts of the US population into thinking that the Hubble is a time machine, though, maybe they'll bitch at NASA and make sure the Hubble gets maintained for the next twenty years! That'd be good.
On the Van Helsing movie site's front page, only one link actually goes to the movie's page. There's links for a video game, a cartoon, repackaged versions of old monster movies, and even Van Helsing merchandise.
If shitty advertisements disguised as films are the best Hollywood can put out, it's no wonder they need the video game industry. I'll take an Enix or Blizzard (well, make that ArenaNet) game over another Matrix sequel any day.
It tells me to troll Slashdot, and buy Kenny G albums.
I'm starting to think it doesn't have my best interests at heart...
One would think that since XAML is built into Longhorn, it will run faster than the open-source equivalent. Kind of like using Aqua/Carbon/whatever for Camino's interface...
There's a chance you'll see .NET for Mac if MS releases a version of Office based on .NET. Not very likely, but possible.
.NET for OS X. That doesn't mean that the platform is useless.
.NET and Java are not the answer. A Java or .NET app is still not going to feel 100% like a native app on every platform, even if you throw some pretty skins on it - there are too many differences. For example, for the longest time the Mac OS had no standard equivalent to Windows' ComboBox, so developers rolled their own. I'm not even sure if OS X has an equivalent. Mac UIs have always been designed somewhat differently than their Windows counterparts, based on that reason and other reasons.
Though, really, why does it matter? Apple doesn't release a version of Mac OS X for x86, so you can't run OS X software on x86, just like Microsoft isn't releasing a version of
If you really want an application that fits into your workflow nicely and cooperates with all the other software on your PC, at least for now, platform-independent solutions like
When Microsoft finally bites the dust or finally changes its business model to adapt to the times (when, not if), that won't be anything to worry about. And all those .NET-specific XML files will still be plain text, easy enough to read and convert... which means people stuck with legacy .NET techology and software won't be stuck. They'll have a relatively easy way to move away from that technology.
C# and the .NET CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) are ECMA standards, which, IIRC, means RAND (reasonable and non-discrimnatory) licensing of all applicable patents/copyrights/diseases related to them is guaranteed. I believe that's what the Mono project is doing most of its work from, most of the MS-specific stuff like WinForms is in a seperate part of the project that isn't required for it to work.
Sedna. It's where all the optimists have been hiding.
IIRC, the standard compiler is 'mcs', so yes, that's a typo.
I really look forward to seeing a day when you can take almost any modern application and run it on pretty much any machine. Now that Microsoft is moving over to a platform-independent, bytecode-based system for most of their applications (well, at least Longhorn) and are encouraging their developers to do so, that day seems to be getting closer.
.NET code with no changes on Fedora or SuSE.
.NET developers out there, and being able to share a codebase between Linux, Windows, and PDAs would probably be a pretty convincing benefit. Sure, there's the .NET Compact Framework, but that basically only works on the most recent versions of WinCE.
It's also slightly encouraging to see Microsoft adopting the use of technology like XML and moving a bit closer to standards with their software... their new vector language is very similar to SVG, and their new forms design language is XML-based. Both seem to be pretty clean and generally simple, which means that at least theoretically it would be possible to convert these formats to truly open formats, and to open them easily in open-source software. It would be really cool to be able to just convert a Windows-oriented XAML file to a Linux-friendly format and then run the associated
The fact that Mono even runs on mobile platforms is nice, because in my opinion J2ME is one of the most horrible APIs I have ever had the misfortune of using - some solid competition for J2ME is definitely needed in the mobile sector, and I think a solid platform based on Linux and Mono might be able to deliver. There are already plenty of
Say hello to IKVM!. It works with Mono and MS's .Net implementation, and has already been demonstrated running full-fledged Java applications like Eclipse, along with translating between aspects of the Java and .NET world. It's a very cool project, and I look forward to seeing it completed.
By "their own devices", you mean the torture devices of the monsters employed by their 'benevolent dictator', right?
Oh, sorry, I forgot. Saddam was a Nice Guy(tm).
It's a picture of STEVE BALLMER!!! *shudder*
The redesign is an attempt to address design criticisms
So they taped a gameboy advance to the front? Well, it sounds a little bulky, but it'll probably do the job.
Virtual Desktop support has actually been in the OS since Win2k, if I remember right. It's done using some of the same functionality they use for Fast User Switching, Remote Desktop, and Terminal Server... they just make use of it differently.
:)
That or it's a cheap hack that keeps track of window locations and shows/hides them quickly. You never can tell with MS, sometimes they implement stuff with dirty hacks just because they can.
Eiffel? Why bother? There is a much better language out there that's already being used heavily on the GNOME platform, along with other platforms like KDE.
What language, you ask?
English!
English is an easy-to-learn and powerful language. A large number of developers already know this language, and there are many tools available to translate it to/from other languages.
English is a robust and mature language, as well. It's been in use for hundreds of years and its capabilities are well-known and understood by many. Try and match that with some ten-year-old language created by hairy UNIX administrators!
Compilers and documentation for English are easy to get a copy of, and many are completely free or very affordable. Almost every college out there offers courses in English.
There are many powerful IDEs available for English - OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, the list goes on.
Unlike languages like Java and French, there is no central committee that says what English can and cannot 'do'. You're free to explore the potential of the language and come up with new instructions and invent new ways to use existing instructions.
I honestly cannot believe that English has been overlooked in this debate. It's a perfect fit for GNOME.
Yeah, especially since iTunes can't play MOD/XM files and has about 3 times the memory/CPU footprint of Winamp5.
We seem to have mostly forgotten about all the garbage IBM pulled in the past, now that they're our Linux buddies, why not Microsoft?
He's not talking about a scripting language. He's talking about offering a consistent, usable way of scripting almost any command-line or GUI application. VB and AppleScript can work with both GUI & Command Line apps, along with entire OO frameworks. I'm not aware of any easy ways to do all that in sh/csh/bash.
If I want to copy a list of filenames from the web browser to the clipboard, and then feed them to a command line ZIP compressor, and then burn that ZIP to a CD, could I do all that easily using sh/csh/bash? I could probably do it in a few minutes using VB, and I'm sure AppleScript would be equally easy (if not easier).
What I find funny is that the same stuff you see in the Looking Glass demonstration videos was demonstrated in a Microsoft Research project a few years back.
I'd show you the proof, but as far as I can tell Microsoft dumped the project (and for good reason, it wasn't really an improvement in usability at all... it was just pretty.)
Dunno. I've never been a big fan of the idea of 3D interfaces, so maybe I'm just a naysayer.
So on OS X, if I download a SWF file or a HTML file with embedded JScript, or visit a page with a Java applet in it, I won't be able to execute any of the scripting code embedded in those files unless I copy them to my hard disk and set an execute flag?
Saying that forcing users to enable an Execution Flag on files before you can run them, is a 'security feature' is ignorant. There are plenty of plain file formats that can contain executable code in them, and an 'execute flag' doesn't do anything to solve that problem. All it does is inconvenience users. Word Macro Viruses were plenty effective even though you couldn't double-click a Word file and run it just like an EXE file.
Winamp3 had a playlist sidebar from the earliest betas.
WMP had a music library with author/album/title searching.
How was iTunes innovative? I guess the fact that Apple did a good job writing a music player is worthy of mention, but it's hardly innovative for Apple to take someone else's idea and do a nice job at porting it to the Mac.
A few years back, during the eFront Fiasco, someone got a hold of ICQ Chat Logs off of the machine of Sam Jain, the CEO of eFront. I was an administrator of one of the sites that got hit hard by the scandal, and if my memory serves the chat logs (which included a lot of very embarassing things being said by Sam and other higher-ups at eFront) were one of the big things that resulted in eFront's eventual destruction.
I can only imagine how much worse it will get when ICQ expands its services.