So I suggest you stop throwing around your absolutes when they're so easy to shoot down.
And yet, you provide not one piece of hard data to back up your criticism.
How many major contributors do you think "flagship" OSS projects like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Apache or the Linux kernel really have? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? I'm talking about the people who really commit a major amount of time to the projects and develop some expertise in the code bases, not people who contribute the occasional bug fix in a specific area.
What do you know about the review processes used for these projects? Do you realise that getting code released into many of them typically requires only a couple of other people on the project team to review it? Sure, other people can look, but something being possible and something being guaranteed are far from the same thing.
And of course, you're ignoring the other question in my previous post: do you really believe that so many people decide they'll just spend an hour reviewing 100 lines of code, and with such wide variety in the code they choose to review, that all (or at least most) of the code base gets properly inspected by many more people? Given the remarkably consistent lack of enthusiasm in the OSS community for working on more obvious practical things like writing documentation, I find this rather hard to believe. But go ahead and prove me wrong: name an OSS project where you think there really is a lot more review than you would get in a typical reasonably well-run commercial closed-source development project, and where the long term bug rate really does come out significantly lower.
Sorry, hit the wrong button while previewing and posted before I was done. I meant to conclude by saying that because of the reputation issue, in practice many employers have redundancy policies that are far more generous to staff than the legally required minimum. Something like a week's salary for every year of service, with a minimum of four weeks, is pretty typical in the software development world. This is usually in addition to any statutory or contractual notice period, during which the employee must still be paid as normal even if they are sent home on garden leave after they've been given their notice.
I'm not aware of anything EU-wide regarding severance packages, though I'm not an expert on this subject so that doesn't mean there isn't anything. However, individual countries often have their own laws in this area.
In the UK, for example, employers have to be careful that they have legitimate legal grounds to fire someone, such as genuine redundancy. An employer can't just let someone go because they don't like them; if they do, they can be called before a tribunal. In any case, there is a certain amount of redundancy pay required. Typically in the UK, the amounts of money involved with either redundancy or a tribunal award aren't worth much to those in the better paid professions, but they can provide a worthwhile safety net to those at the lower end of the salary spectrum.
Of course, if a business that works in something like software development gets a reputation for being a bad employer, the financial cost is the least of their worries. It is a small world, and if you live in a high-tech city as I do, one bad mistake where staff are treated unreasonably can be enough to pretty much turn your reputation to mud within days. Good luck getting any really good people to work for you after that...
As for 'provide more objective data' it is common knowledge in the software industry that Security through Obscurity doesn't work, and that the contrary is true that you get Insecurity through Obscurity. [...] You shouldn't go around saying that you won't believe what someone says just because they didn't present you any sources. I know that this is slashdot but this ultra lazy way to combat an argument doesn't work in the modern era of these things called search engines.
I don't disbelieve it just because they didn't cite sources. Despite my strong wording earlier, I'm quite prepared to change my position if someone can show me a decent argument. But I won't accept it on trust alone, because it conflicts with some of my own experience, and it simply isn't supported by the evidence I have seen to date. I always try to keep an open mind on these issues, but it's going to take more than someone's wishful thinking to convince me when I've already spent a lot of time reading up on the subject and looking at real evidence.
And by the way, your post is guilty of both appeal to authority and appeal to the masses. These are not the ways to win an argument with someone trained in logic.:-)
I agree with all of that, and as always, I should stress that I have nothing against these projects and am grateful to those who contribute their efforts to developing them so others can benefit. I am simply objecting to the OSS marketing machine making unjustified claims. That leads to situations like the one my girlfriend is currently in, where her PC at work is loaded with the latest straight-from-CVS OSS builds rather than stable versions or tried-and-tested commercial products, just because the young IT guys are of the Microsoft-hating variety. Unsurprisingly, these come with many bugs, and guess who gets asked about every single one of them?
I know people on Slashdot don't like to hear this, but I don't have any problem with this at all. People working on their employer's premises using their employer's systems should not have free rein to surf to their hearts' content, chat with dozens of friends on IM, or send emails to all their closest friends.
Perhaps not, but you imply a black and white classification where no shades of grey exist. There are options in between people freeloading all day and people having no access. For example, if I telephone my bank (a call I can only make during working hours) from work then I do not expect my employer to object, and I certainly do not expect them to log any passcodes or similar I have to type into the phone keypad to use the service. The same applies, for exactly the same reasons, if I visit the web site of a financial services provider during my lunch hour. One can make similar cases for dealing with health organisations, making urgent arrangements for dependents, dealing with legal representatives while moving house, and countless other areas.
Such use of office communications facilities is not only reasonable and occasionally necessary for the average person, it is also fundamentally private and something my employer has no need to know. Now, perhaps to you business is a 100% commitment, but to me, employees are still humans rather than robots, and the law should require that businesses acknowledge this.
Yes, I agree with pretty much everything you're saying. The bottom line is that with freedom must come responsibility. If you have perfect anonymity, you are free to do as you wish on-line with no accountability whatsoever. I suspect that there are just too many people in the world who will take advantage of that for perfect anonymity to be in society's interests, particularly in a medium where a single obnoxious person can cause disproportionate damage (cf. spammers, botnets, etc.).
Of course, perfect anonymity — in particular, true anonymity from any government authorities — also has genuine advantages.
You might be right. I don't know enough about US employment law to even take a guess. But remember that the general framework for employment in the US is very different to the EU (at least for most US states vs. most EU nations). For example, in the US employment is mostly "at will", whereas in the EU, notice is normally required from both employee and employer if they want to terminate the employment contract. That alone makes employment a bigger commitment by both parties than it would be in an "at will" state.
It doesn't take a genius to work this out. The code base for major OSS projects like Thunderbird typically runs to hundreds of thousands of lines of code as a minimum. (To give another example, recent versions of the Linux kernel have been approaching eight figures.) An experienced inspector examining code under review conditions will consider hundreds of lines per hour, the rate in practice depending on the nature of the code being reviewed (intricate maths and system level stuff tend to take longer than routine UI logic, for example). Do you really believe that anyone, other than the developers and perhaps a few very interested individuals, spends the thousands of hours that would be required to effectively review the sort of code base we're talking about for security vulnerabilities? Do you really believe that anyone, other than those people, just comes along and thinks "What shall I do for the next hour? I know, I'll go review 100 lines from the latest patch to Thunderbird for security vulnerabilities!"? Well, sorry, but I don't buy it.
First of all, it's "many eyes make more secure software;" and second, it's not a myth - security through obscurity does not pan out.
I'm doing well today: that's another dogmatic statement of fact given without any supporting evidence or reasoning. Can you provide more objective data than the last guy did to support your position? I know it's trendy to quote those sound-bites around here, but I'd still like some kind of argument to debate!
I'm not failing to grasp anything here. My original post was in reply to a comment saying that Thunderbird was now a competitor to Outlook. My point is simply that this is not the case, and that the gaps in calendaring functionality are one reason why. I am not commenting on the general value of Thunderbird, disputing its other advantages, or challenging the manhood of its (male) developers.
I challenge you to find a serious website that uses ActiveX for a serious use.
Our team intranet, which collects together various information about builds and bugs and provides a facility to run useful programs direct from links on the web page.
Anyway, lawsuits like these are why companies today have aceptable use policies.
Which are worth very little if the employee is found not to have agreed to them willingly (e.g., because they were part of an employment contract and the employer and employee did not have equal bargaining power in its negotiation) and even less if they are found to contravene the employee's inalienable human rights (as was the case here).
Remember, boys and girls: just because you say something in a contract, that doesn't mean it will stand up in court, particularly if what you're saying is an obvious attempt to screw the other party in an unreasonable way.
It is still quite legal for an employer in the EU to declare that its computers, phones, etc are for business use only, and that correspondence will be monitored.
That's a very bold statement. Care to back it up with sources?
We should also note that there is a difference between monitoring and intercepting communications. In essence, the former is looking at things like where an e-mail going from and to or the addresses of web sites visited, while the latter involves observing the content. This ruling seems to refer only to monitoring communications.
For those who are interested in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office publish a rather detailed Employment Practices Code (caution: large PDF) that gives a lot of guidance to employers on the relevant laws and guidelines. The topic of intercepting electronic communications such as phones and e-mail is covered in a fair bit of detail.
Having said that, in this case Thunderbird *does* have the ability to compete with Outlook on the Windows front
No, it really doesn't. That's my point. Thunderbird is no more a competitor for Outlook (as it's typically used, i.e., by businesses who also use Exchange Server) than OpenOffice is for Word and Excel. While all these OSS products are great for certain markets — home users who want decent but cheap/free software being the obvious one — the post that started this thread implied that Thunderbird was now ready for the business market by pitching it as an Outlook competitor. That simply isn't true, and it isn't really in anyone's interests to pretend otherwise.
As I mentioned to another respondent, I was referring to the standard software at the business where I work. But in any case, this thread is about an Outlook competitor. That makes "open" standards that aren't used by Outlook irrelevant, in this context. The same goes for most of the other bullet points I mentioned. If your entire business runs on Windows, cross-platform capability isn't worth much, is it?
Since when has Exchange+Outlook been the business standard? It isn't a standard of anything, not even a de facto one.
I was referring the standard at the business where I work. What other people use isn't of much interest to me. (However, at the rate it's going in terms of market share, Exchange will have a legitimate claim to being a de facto standard within a couple of years.)
As much as it hurts to say, both Novell Groupwise and IBM Lotus Notes are far superior groupware applications.
I don't know anyone who agrees with you, at least as far as Notes goes, and I've had this discussion several times...
Um, you know why Firefox and Thunderbird are extremely more secure then their MS counterparts? For Firefox, it is a lack of ActiveX, which is nothing but trouble, and the fact that FF isn't as tied to the OS as IE is.
That's hardly a fair comparison. One man's "nothing but trouble" is another man's "essential functionality", and the refusal to support ActiveX is a serious dent in Firefox's ability to take over the browser market from IE.
You might not buy the "many eyes myth", but it is not too hard to see. You cannot hide a bug as easily when the code is available for all, you also do not have to rely solely on the vendor when code is available.
Yes, you can, because pretty much no-one other than a handful of developers ever actually reads that code. That is exactly the same situation as a typical closed-source, commercial development. Similarly, almost no-one other than the original development team work on a lot of major OSS projects. Check out who contributes to OpenOffice for an obvious example. The whole "if you don't like it, you can fork it/fix it" idea isn't going to cut much ice with end users who don't work in software development, now is it?
Apparently you believe that there is room for exactly one collaboration tool in the universe. You seem to be oblivious to the market that exists outside the Windows space.
Well, since you were talking about a competitor to Outlook, I took it as read that we were discussing the "Windows space". Sorry if that wasn't your intent.
I was forced to give up using Thunderbird at work, because some people I started working with elsewhere in the organisation relied on Exchange+Outlook calendaring facilities. In other words, I ought to be a prime target for Lightning. I'm also a geek who understands more than a pretty UI about what's involved with actually doing this.
What do I see at the top of the lightning page?
Open source
Open standards
Cross-platform
Extensible
Do you know how many of those I care about at work? Exactly none. And neither does pretty much anyone else in the target market for this product.
What I do care about is how well it integrates with Exchange Server, and whether its notifications for meetings and such are compatible with the business standard Exchange+Outlook combination. However, the word "Exchange" does not appear anywhere on the product home page; nor does "Outlook".
In other words, either their web page is terrible, or this isn't even close to making Thunderbird into a serious Outlook competitor. Given that the current version of Lightning is 0.3.1 (as in, starting with "0.") I'm going to go with the not-even-close version, and so it just about everyone else.
I'm afraid TFA was much the same: yet more of the popular "many eyes make secure software myth" (seriously, are we still peddling that nonsense?) and more cries about the greatness of Thunderbird due to its extensibility (does anyone reading this actually use Thunderbird with any extensions, never mind the natural way they are routinely used by Firefox users?).
Sorry to be so negative. I'm grateful to those who spend their time writing Thunderbird and giving it away to others, I really am. But it's starting to suffer from the two major diseases of the OSS world: a mistaken belief that users care more about philosophy than functionality, and a mistaken belief that OSS is somehow immune to the normal problems with software development just because some of its popular applications haven't (yet) been compromised as badly as the mainstream commercial players. I like the product, but until its marketing stops talking crap, I'm going to criticise the marketing.
The only problem with your comment is that, apart from a few high-profile people like politicians and movie stars, your reasoning could be applied to pretty much all death threats... including the ones that are actually carried out.
1080 units are certainly not exceptional. You'll find them in Curry's, Comet, John Lewis, small retailers.
Sure you will, today. But the common brands only really got them out in time for Christmas last year, and even the premium brands you normally find in specialist TV and hi-fi shops only really picked up 1080 in the middle of last year. Even then, it's only larger screens that have it for the most part.
If you don't know anyone with an HD TV that isn't 1080 native, then either you don't know anyone who bought HD more than a year or so ago, or all your friends are seriously rich and/or connected in the business. I know this, because I was looking for a top-spec TV in time for Christmas the previous year, and there was absolutely nothing (including the £5k top-of-the-range models from premium brands) that would do 1080 available here at the time — not one single model.
So, what proportion of HDTVs actually in use in people's homes do you think can do 1080? 5%? Maybe 10%? I'd call that exceptional.
Seems to me, the PS3 is pushing 1080P capable devices into millions of homes (sales issues aside).
Then you just need a TV that can display it.:-)
Perhaps it's different in the US, but certainly here in the UK, 1080 is still exceptional, and almost all HDTVs are really just displaying 720p. Even the serious brands you get from speciality shops have only started supplying 1080-capable units very recently (months, not years) and they cost a fortune even by geek standards. So while I'm sure Planet Earth will look great in HD, I doubt that even I as a TV-enjoying geek will have a box that can display it any time for the next few years. Given the prices involved, I rather doubt support from games consoles is going to change that very much.
Whether you write for the desktop or web you have to check compatibility if you're using anything cutting edge.
That's true. The moral of the story is that you shouldn't use things that are cutting edge just for the sake of it. Nearly all cutting edge technologies I see in use in software development today are being used to do something that old, tried-and-tested technology could have done just as well.
Consider many people can't distinguish between a high definition picture and a standard definition picture warped to fit their HD screen, this question seems largely academic.
That's because, given a good upscaler, you can't distinguish much difference between DVD quality (which is most people's benchmark of what their SD TV can do) and 720p (which is what most HDTVs show). If by "standard definition" you're talking about crappy, digitally compressed TV channels at lower resolutions, then sure, there's a difference there, though I do wonder how much of the perceived improvement is due simply to using less lossy compression, rather than to genuine resolution improvement.
Even looking at DVD vs. HD, you can see the difference in things like crowd scenes, detailed nature shots, or sports where the players are filmed from way back so you can see the field as well — basically anything where there isn't enough detail in the source material for any upscaler to work with. However, for most things I watch at least, that doesn't apply. There basically isn't much difference in face shots, action scenes set in a street/building and filmed from fairly close in, or most CGI and special effects.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, you provide not one piece of hard data to back up your criticism.
How many major contributors do you think "flagship" OSS projects like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Apache or the Linux kernel really have? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? I'm talking about the people who really commit a major amount of time to the projects and develop some expertise in the code bases, not people who contribute the occasional bug fix in a specific area.
What do you know about the review processes used for these projects? Do you realise that getting code released into many of them typically requires only a couple of other people on the project team to review it? Sure, other people can look, but something being possible and something being guaranteed are far from the same thing.
And of course, you're ignoring the other question in my previous post: do you really believe that so many people decide they'll just spend an hour reviewing 100 lines of code, and with such wide variety in the code they choose to review, that all (or at least most) of the code base gets properly inspected by many more people? Given the remarkably consistent lack of enthusiasm in the OSS community for working on more obvious practical things like writing documentation, I find this rather hard to believe. But go ahead and prove me wrong: name an OSS project where you think there really is a lot more review than you would get in a typical reasonably well-run commercial closed-source development project, and where the long term bug rate really does come out significantly lower.
Sorry, hit the wrong button while previewing and posted before I was done. I meant to conclude by saying that because of the reputation issue, in practice many employers have redundancy policies that are far more generous to staff than the legally required minimum. Something like a week's salary for every year of service, with a minimum of four weeks, is pretty typical in the software development world. This is usually in addition to any statutory or contractual notice period, during which the employee must still be paid as normal even if they are sent home on garden leave after they've been given their notice.
I'm not aware of anything EU-wide regarding severance packages, though I'm not an expert on this subject so that doesn't mean there isn't anything. However, individual countries often have their own laws in this area.
In the UK, for example, employers have to be careful that they have legitimate legal grounds to fire someone, such as genuine redundancy. An employer can't just let someone go because they don't like them; if they do, they can be called before a tribunal. In any case, there is a certain amount of redundancy pay required. Typically in the UK, the amounts of money involved with either redundancy or a tribunal award aren't worth much to those in the better paid professions, but they can provide a worthwhile safety net to those at the lower end of the salary spectrum.
Of course, if a business that works in something like software development gets a reputation for being a bad employer, the financial cost is the least of their worries. It is a small world, and if you live in a high-tech city as I do, one bad mistake where staff are treated unreasonably can be enough to pretty much turn your reputation to mud within days. Good luck getting any really good people to work for you after that...
I don't disbelieve it just because they didn't cite sources. Despite my strong wording earlier, I'm quite prepared to change my position if someone can show me a decent argument. But I won't accept it on trust alone, because it conflicts with some of my own experience, and it simply isn't supported by the evidence I have seen to date. I always try to keep an open mind on these issues, but it's going to take more than someone's wishful thinking to convince me when I've already spent a lot of time reading up on the subject and looking at real evidence.
And by the way, your post is guilty of both appeal to authority and appeal to the masses. These are not the ways to win an argument with someone trained in logic. :-)
I agree with all of that, and as always, I should stress that I have nothing against these projects and am grateful to those who contribute their efforts to developing them so others can benefit. I am simply objecting to the OSS marketing machine making unjustified claims. That leads to situations like the one my girlfriend is currently in, where her PC at work is loaded with the latest straight-from-CVS OSS builds rather than stable versions or tried-and-tested commercial products, just because the young IT guys are of the Microsoft-hating variety. Unsurprisingly, these come with many bugs, and guess who gets asked about every single one of them?
Perhaps not, but you imply a black and white classification where no shades of grey exist. There are options in between people freeloading all day and people having no access. For example, if I telephone my bank (a call I can only make during working hours) from work then I do not expect my employer to object, and I certainly do not expect them to log any passcodes or similar I have to type into the phone keypad to use the service. The same applies, for exactly the same reasons, if I visit the web site of a financial services provider during my lunch hour. One can make similar cases for dealing with health organisations, making urgent arrangements for dependents, dealing with legal representatives while moving house, and countless other areas.
Such use of office communications facilities is not only reasonable and occasionally necessary for the average person, it is also fundamentally private and something my employer has no need to know. Now, perhaps to you business is a 100% commitment, but to me, employees are still humans rather than robots, and the law should require that businesses acknowledge this.
Yes, I agree with pretty much everything you're saying. The bottom line is that with freedom must come responsibility. If you have perfect anonymity, you are free to do as you wish on-line with no accountability whatsoever. I suspect that there are just too many people in the world who will take advantage of that for perfect anonymity to be in society's interests, particularly in a medium where a single obnoxious person can cause disproportionate damage (cf. spammers, botnets, etc.).
Of course, perfect anonymity — in particular, true anonymity from any government authorities — also has genuine advantages.
You might be right. I don't know enough about US employment law to even take a guess. But remember that the general framework for employment in the US is very different to the EU (at least for most US states vs. most EU nations). For example, in the US employment is mostly "at will", whereas in the EU, notice is normally required from both employee and employer if they want to terminate the employment contract. That alone makes employment a bigger commitment by both parties than it would be in an "at will" state.
It doesn't take a genius to work this out. The code base for major OSS projects like Thunderbird typically runs to hundreds of thousands of lines of code as a minimum. (To give another example, recent versions of the Linux kernel have been approaching eight figures.) An experienced inspector examining code under review conditions will consider hundreds of lines per hour, the rate in practice depending on the nature of the code being reviewed (intricate maths and system level stuff tend to take longer than routine UI logic, for example). Do you really believe that anyone, other than the developers and perhaps a few very interested individuals, spends the thousands of hours that would be required to effectively review the sort of code base we're talking about for security vulnerabilities? Do you really believe that anyone, other than those people, just comes along and thinks "What shall I do for the next hour? I know, I'll go review 100 lines from the latest patch to Thunderbird for security vulnerabilities!"? Well, sorry, but I don't buy it.
I'm doing well today: that's another dogmatic statement of fact given without any supporting evidence or reasoning. Can you provide more objective data than the last guy did to support your position? I know it's trendy to quote those sound-bites around here, but I'd still like some kind of argument to debate!
I'm not failing to grasp anything here. My original post was in reply to a comment saying that Thunderbird was now a competitor to Outlook. My point is simply that this is not the case, and that the gaps in calendaring functionality are one reason why. I am not commenting on the general value of Thunderbird, disputing its other advantages, or challenging the manhood of its (male) developers.
Our team intranet, which collects together various information about builds and bugs and provides a facility to run useful programs direct from links on the web page.
No.
Which are worth very little if the employee is found not to have agreed to them willingly (e.g., because they were part of an employment contract and the employer and employee did not have equal bargaining power in its negotiation) and even less if they are found to contravene the employee's inalienable human rights (as was the case here).
Remember, boys and girls: just because you say something in a contract, that doesn't mean it will stand up in court, particularly if what you're saying is an obvious attempt to screw the other party in an unreasonable way.
That's a very bold statement. Care to back it up with sources?
We should also note that there is a difference between monitoring and intercepting communications. In essence, the former is looking at things like where an e-mail going from and to or the addresses of web sites visited, while the latter involves observing the content. This ruling seems to refer only to monitoring communications.
For those who are interested in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office publish a rather detailed Employment Practices Code (caution: large PDF) that gives a lot of guidance to employers on the relevant laws and guidelines. The topic of intercepting electronic communications such as phones and e-mail is covered in a fair bit of detail.
No, it really doesn't. That's my point. Thunderbird is no more a competitor for Outlook (as it's typically used, i.e., by businesses who also use Exchange Server) than OpenOffice is for Word and Excel. While all these OSS products are great for certain markets — home users who want decent but cheap/free software being the obvious one — the post that started this thread implied that Thunderbird was now ready for the business market by pitching it as an Outlook competitor. That simply isn't true, and it isn't really in anyone's interests to pretend otherwise.
As I mentioned to another respondent, I was referring to the standard software at the business where I work. But in any case, this thread is about an Outlook competitor. That makes "open" standards that aren't used by Outlook irrelevant, in this context. The same goes for most of the other bullet points I mentioned. If your entire business runs on Windows, cross-platform capability isn't worth much, is it?
I was referring the standard at the business where I work. What other people use isn't of much interest to me. (However, at the rate it's going in terms of market share, Exchange will have a legitimate claim to being a de facto standard within a couple of years.)
I don't know anyone who agrees with you, at least as far as Notes goes, and I've had this discussion several times...
That's hardly a fair comparison. One man's "nothing but trouble" is another man's "essential functionality", and the refusal to support ActiveX is a serious dent in Firefox's ability to take over the browser market from IE.
Yes, you can, because pretty much no-one other than a handful of developers ever actually reads that code. That is exactly the same situation as a typical closed-source, commercial development. Similarly, almost no-one other than the original development team work on a lot of major OSS projects. Check out who contributes to OpenOffice for an obvious example. The whole "if you don't like it, you can fork it/fix it" idea isn't going to cut much ice with end users who don't work in software development, now is it?
Well, since you were talking about a competitor to Outlook, I took it as read that we were discussing the "Windows space". Sorry if that wasn't your intent.
I was forced to give up using Thunderbird at work, because some people I started working with elsewhere in the organisation relied on Exchange+Outlook calendaring facilities. In other words, I ought to be a prime target for Lightning. I'm also a geek who understands more than a pretty UI about what's involved with actually doing this.
What do I see at the top of the lightning page?
Do you know how many of those I care about at work? Exactly none. And neither does pretty much anyone else in the target market for this product.
What I do care about is how well it integrates with Exchange Server, and whether its notifications for meetings and such are compatible with the business standard Exchange+Outlook combination. However, the word "Exchange" does not appear anywhere on the product home page; nor does "Outlook".
In other words, either their web page is terrible, or this isn't even close to making Thunderbird into a serious Outlook competitor. Given that the current version of Lightning is 0.3.1 (as in, starting with "0.") I'm going to go with the not-even-close version, and so it just about everyone else.
I'm afraid TFA was much the same: yet more of the popular "many eyes make secure software myth" (seriously, are we still peddling that nonsense?) and more cries about the greatness of Thunderbird due to its extensibility (does anyone reading this actually use Thunderbird with any extensions, never mind the natural way they are routinely used by Firefox users?).
Sorry to be so negative. I'm grateful to those who spend their time writing Thunderbird and giving it away to others, I really am. But it's starting to suffer from the two major diseases of the OSS world: a mistaken belief that users care more about philosophy than functionality, and a mistaken belief that OSS is somehow immune to the normal problems with software development just because some of its popular applications haven't (yet) been compromised as badly as the mainstream commercial players. I like the product, but until its marketing stops talking crap, I'm going to criticise the marketing.
The only problem with your comment is that, apart from a few high-profile people like politicians and movie stars, your reasoning could be applied to pretty much all death threats... including the ones that are actually carried out.
Sure you will, today. But the common brands only really got them out in time for Christmas last year, and even the premium brands you normally find in specialist TV and hi-fi shops only really picked up 1080 in the middle of last year. Even then, it's only larger screens that have it for the most part.
If you don't know anyone with an HD TV that isn't 1080 native, then either you don't know anyone who bought HD more than a year or so ago, or all your friends are seriously rich and/or connected in the business. I know this, because I was looking for a top-spec TV in time for Christmas the previous year, and there was absolutely nothing (including the £5k top-of-the-range models from premium brands) that would do 1080 available here at the time — not one single model.
So, what proportion of HDTVs actually in use in people's homes do you think can do 1080? 5%? Maybe 10%? I'd call that exceptional.
In other words, this only applies to LCD TVs that people have bought in the past three months or so.
And even then, only to the really large screens, which aren't what most people buy.
I don't know what you'd call that, but I stand by "exceptional".
Then you just need a TV that can display it. :-)
Perhaps it's different in the US, but certainly here in the UK, 1080 is still exceptional, and almost all HDTVs are really just displaying 720p. Even the serious brands you get from speciality shops have only started supplying 1080-capable units very recently (months, not years) and they cost a fortune even by geek standards. So while I'm sure Planet Earth will look great in HD, I doubt that even I as a TV-enjoying geek will have a box that can display it any time for the next few years. Given the prices involved, I rather doubt support from games consoles is going to change that very much.
Blockquoth the AC:
That's true. The moral of the story is that you shouldn't use things that are cutting edge just for the sake of it. Nearly all cutting edge technologies I see in use in software development today are being used to do something that old, tried-and-tested technology could have done just as well.
That's because, given a good upscaler, you can't distinguish much difference between DVD quality (which is most people's benchmark of what their SD TV can do) and 720p (which is what most HDTVs show). If by "standard definition" you're talking about crappy, digitally compressed TV channels at lower resolutions, then sure, there's a difference there, though I do wonder how much of the perceived improvement is due simply to using less lossy compression, rather than to genuine resolution improvement.
Even looking at DVD vs. HD, you can see the difference in things like crowd scenes, detailed nature shots, or sports where the players are filmed from way back so you can see the field as well — basically anything where there isn't enough detail in the source material for any upscaler to work with. However, for most things I watch at least, that doesn't apply. There basically isn't much difference in face shots, action scenes set in a street/building and filmed from fairly close in, or most CGI and special effects.