It's strange that you have that experience, because we've ported several code bases of comparable size to the beta with no such difficulties. It took a few minutes to deal with warnings about deprecated functions, but there weren't many since in C++ there aren't many reasons to prefer C-style strings over a decent class anyway.
I think you have to bear in mind that Sunbird is a very immature product itself, and we're talking about 0.1 versions here. The dev team for Sunbird, unfortunately, seem to be almost non-existent, and have chosen to prioritise things like CalDAV. They're not, according to the last roadmap I looked at (a few weeks ago now, so check yourself if it matters to you) giving any particular time to Exchange compatibility at all. Which is a shame, because I bet the latter would be useful to far more people in practice.
And equally, because it's handy to have appointments automatically generate communications, e.g., to invite people to a meeting, log their reply, confirm with everyone that the meeting will go ahead once you've had all the replies back, and then issue a reminder automatically n minutes before the start time.
The fact that most of the guys here can do this sort of stuff (using Outlook/Exchange) and I can't (using TBird) means I can't actually book any of the company rooms for meetings, and other equally daft things. This isn't particularly a problem, and they humour me and my kind because we've been using alternatives since before Outlook became the office standard, but it would be useful to have the same functionality as everyone else, rather than just using TBird to escape the fatal data loss bugs in MS products that caused me to switch in the first place.
They do this simply because the betas for OOo 2.0 are simply so much more stable and functional than 1.1.x that there is no reason not to use them.
So I heard in the last thread on this subject, and a lot of people disagreed then, too. By all means try it, but don't bet your business on it; there were some pretty basic bugs in the beta I downloaded just over a week ago.
Which is why for common forms like breast cancer, there is a screening programme for those most likely to be at risk. The killer about cancer -- quite literally -- is usually finding it too late. The survival rates with sufficiently early diagnosis are very good for most forms of cancer today, even those that sadly remain mostly lethal by the time they are detected using obvious physical symptoms.
A reliable and readily administered detection mechanism for even most forms of cancer would probably save many thousands of lives every year.
Sheridan: "You have a face people can trust."
Ivanova: "I would rather have a face people would fear."
Ivanova: "I know, I know. It's a Russian thing. When we're about to do something stupid, we like to catalog the full extent of our stupidity, for future reference"
Draal: "I like you. You're trouble!"
Ivanova: "Thank you. Nicest thing anyone's said about me in days."
Ivanova: "Good luck, Captain. I think you're about to go where everyone's gone before!"
And of course her defining moment for the entire series:
Ivanova: "Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andrei and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth... I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me."
I agree there's no particular reason for the strong characters to be male in sci-fi, but there are plenty of examples of strong female characters in recent shows. I'd extend your list somewhat:
Babylon 5
Ivanova (possibly the best female character in sci-fi ever)
Delenn
Elizabeth Lochley
Star Trek + spin-offs
Kira Nerys
Kathryn Janeway
Firefly
Pretty much the whole female cast
SG-1 + Atlantis
Sam Carter
Elizabeth Weir
BSG (the new one)
Starbuck
Dr Who
Rose Tyler
Those are the first few that come to mind, all of them not just strong female characters, but main fixtures of the biggest sci-fi series in recent years.
I wonder whether posters like me fall under your "Microsoft apologist" heading. I hope not, but I guess if you read a thread where I defended them (because I happened to feel that the criticism was unjustified) and didn't read the threads where I slagged them off (because I happened to feel that they deserved slagging off) then you might get that idea.
What I've noticed in recent years is that the gap between the trolls and those wanting to have a reasonable discussion has widened, to the point that in many of the serious discussions, several participants will ultimately disagree quite amicably, but each with their own arguments for why they do so. One of the results of this is that the old, groupthink-style "Company X good, Company Y bad" arguments have become rather transparent, and anyone stating unfounded absolutes is likely to get called on it no matter which organisation they are (not) supporting. Some would say that's just provoking arguments; others would describe it as keeping an open mind.
And no, I don't work for Microsoft (though I've had interesting and helpful discussions with at least two Slashdot posters who openly do, and I do defend some of their products from what I see as unjustified criticism occasionally).
I think most software is well suited for web conversion. Especially leveraging flash and java. [...] I think it would be a smash hit, if done right. And believe me, with current technology you can do it right.
No, I'm sorry, but I can't believe you. Let's consider the implications of what you're proposing a little more deeply for a moment...
You could write equivalents of microsoft word or adobe photoshop in flash or java, and except for printing get pretty much identical operation (and even printing wouldn't necessarily be that awful).
Here are a few reasons that's not really true:
Security
Or rather, the complete lack of it that would be fundamentally necessary. How are you going to allow (safe) access to local resources like printers or disk storage if you're using a web-based app, with any current security model? On another front, how do you feel about trusting some unknown people supporting third party software you're running remotely with all the information you store in a financial application? Do you think it would be responsible for the HR department of a business to "outsource" their confidential personnel records to a third party application running remotely?
Performance
Regardless of the claims of the evangelists, it's pretty clear that average programming technique is getting sloppier according to something very close to "inverse Moore's law". As sure as night follows day, moving to a distributed software-as-a-service model will be the next great chance to reduce performance by an order of magnitude for pretty much no benefit whatsoever.
Flexibility
There is nothing you can do in a distributed application that you can't do locally, except distribute the data and processing. The value of these will inevitably vary with context. On the other hand, desktop software today has vastly more flexibility in terms of interaction design (and the security and performance issues I've mentioned already) than any distributed system ever will. If it takes a few seconds to download a Flash widget showing off some product on a manufacturer's web site, how long is it going to take to download the equivalent of a word processor or graphics manipulation tool every time I need to use one? Note that even major projects like Firefox can't take the hit of everyone downloading a new executable at once when an update comes out, and that's a relatively small application with a relatively small user base.
Reliability
Most places can't even keep a web site up 24/7/365; of those sites I read regularly, only the BBC have managed no major outings in the past year. Imagine the carnage that would ensue if some service software provider lost their connection, or got the equivalent of the Slashdot effect at 9am every morning as all the businesses in the time zone tried to download their updated office software for the day. Is your ISP 100% reliable in providing a connection, at the full theoretical bandwidth you're paying for, and trustworthy as far as cutting you off from the service in the event of, say, a false claim of abuse?
There are any number of variations on these themes, but I think the whole software-as-a-service model is so flawed for most of today's typical desktop applications that the above should suffice to make the point.
It's interesting that the article almost takes it as read that just about everything will become a service, and accepts the arguments from a senior marketing guy at a software-as-a-service firm apparently without question. I'm not sure I'd agree with that view; some applications have a lot of potential here, but AFAICS, others just... don't. What am I missing?
OK. I'm sure there must be someone somwhere who really does find more than one or two of the gizmos useful, and perhaps you're him. Fair enough.
Even so, I can't help noticing that your top-of-the-line phone is currently listed at around the $400 mark, give or take whatever special offer is running this week. If you'd only spent $50 on the phone, I wonder how much real computing hardware you could have bought, if you have a genuine use for the organiser and mathematical functions, and how much better at everything you describe it would be.
You may not use those features, but someone does, and probably on a very regular basis.
I very much doubt most people would miss them if they weren't there. In my whole life, surrounded by people with mobile phones, I have met one person who I've ever seen use his WAP browser. I have seen a calculator used on a mobile phone twice, and both times I'd worked out the correct answer in my head faster. You get the idea.
I think all this stuff is a triumph of marketing over necessity. How many people would really miss any of these features if they weren't there?
So you'd rather carry around a camera, a PDA, a calculator, an MP3 player, an alarm clock, and all the other junk instead of having it all in one convenient package? I hope you have a lot of pockets...
The two aren't equivalent. There's a huge difference between having a real PDA and some token naff organiser thing on a mobile phone. A real MP3 player would have far more capacity than the recently announced phones. A real calculator or computer system can blow away anything integrated into any phone I've ever seen. A real digital camera can produce vastly higher resolution images than any phone.
Even ignoring that, how often do people really need to take all of these things everywhere they go anyway? I don't see the convenience, nor even the novelty value, and apparently neither does pretty much everyone I know or walk past in the street.
Of course, time will tell which of us is right. I'll bet you a drink that when large parts of mobile phone networks start dying because all the 3G/4G devices running $MOBILE_OS got infected with a virus within minutes, people find giving up all the naff extras a small price to pay for being able to make a call when they need to.
You can bet that as cellphones become more sophisicated and more interconnected to our computers, malware authors are going to turn this into a genuine threat.
An objective observer (which the various anti-virus people probably aren't) might ask why a mobile phone needs to become "more sophisticated" in the first place. My phone was a freebie about four years ago when I signed up, and still has way more features than I ever want or need.
Give me a good phone book feature, voice, text messaging and some sort of answerphone if I can't take a call. I don't need it to be a low quality digital camera, hard-to-use PDA, sub-standard web browser, trivial calculator, poor-capacity MP3 player, pathetically quiet alarm clock, and all the other junk. Nor do I need it to run some super-complicated operating system that's ripe for attacking.
If you have the source and need something to be fixed you can, as a last resort, fix it yourself. Without the source you have less options. Which is more desirable?
That depends entirely on whether it's more likely that the supplier of your closed source product gives up or that you won't realistically be able to find your way around the source and fix a problem. Which do you think is the greater danger to an average user?
The big advantage of open source is that someone, somewhere probably has that skill and knowledge, and as long as one person is prepared to use it to benefit the community, everyone else is safe. Of course, if you lose the person/people who are willing to do this, you're no better off practically than you were losing a commercial supplier, source code or not.
Take a quick look around the major OSS projects, and you can see that this reliance on good samaritans works very well in some cases, but very poorly in others. In general, Joe User has to place a bet, and the best he can do is bank on the software he thinks will be safest.
With Internet explorer I do not have that ability.
With Firefox, 99.999% of users don't either. That's kinda my point. The fact that something is theoretically possible doesn't help much in the real world if almost no-one can do it in practice.
I'm afraid I have been unclear. I am not challenging the facts of your posts. I am simply saying that, for most people, they are irrelevant.
Within the first few minutes of this discussion starting, I lost track of the number of posters making smart-ass comments about how Firefox rocks compared to IE, because the patch was already out when the exploit hit. I nearly suffocated under the smugness coming off the geek brigades.
And yet, they (and, based on your most recent post, you) seem completely ignorant of the fact that nearly all security flaws in IE are patched well before exploits are found in the wild, too. Most (all?) of the major outbreaks that have hit mainstream media headlines in recent months would have been completely avoided if people had patched their systems; sometimes there were months before the exploits appeared.
So, if the Firefox patch was out but not applied, then the fact that it exists on a web site somewhere really doesn't matter to most people, and neither is it a particular advantage of Firefox over any alternative browser. This may not have been the point you were trying to make, and perhaps I picked the wrong initial post to reply to when making mine, but it's certainly a strange thing a lot of people around here today seem to believe.
Please go and read my post again. Manual updating doesn't pick up the patch either. The only way to get it if you're not in the first update wave is to find out about it independently and go get it from the web site.
ActiveX is the one thing left in IE that makes it truly, the most insecure browser out there.
It's also the major reason large numbers of huge companies aren't adopting Firefox, since it's the technology many of them base their Intranets on. It's a security risk when outside sites can use it, but not having it for internal pages is a PITA at times.
As always with open source, if the Mozilla guys drop the ball and you know what you're doing, you can patch it yourself.
Sure. I imagine at least a dozen people in the world have the in-depth knowledge of the relevant area of the Firefox codebase, out of the hundreds of thousands or millions who now use it. Maybe I'll just go spend two weeks finding my way around myself, and become lucky 13.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but that argument is getting a bit tired these days.
Please note my comments earlier in the thread: since the patch hasn't hit the auto-updates yet, even if you check for it manually, this patch does not exist for most users. There is an exploit for it in the wild. Hence most Firefox users are not safe from this exploit.
There, I put the actually relevant bits in bold for you, just to make it clear. Firefox is a great product for many reasons, but let's not kid ourselves that its security policy is perfect right now, OK? If my Firefox browser had popped up within a few minutes of the patch being released and invited me to download it, you'd have had a case, but it didn't.
I have little time for browser wars, but it is notable that despite the 1.0.7 announcement even making Slashdot yesterday, it's not showing up as an automatic download yet. Worse, it doesn't show up even if you manually check for updates.
There's not much point patching a security issue if you can't distribute the patch and even conscientious users won't find out about it by the expected method.
I also expect to see a Firefox extension to load up a custom Slashdot stylesheet (and maybe a/. styles database site to find good ones)
I'm betting an awful lot of them will set all the classes for ads not to display...
Personally, I like a lot of the minor changes -- the boxes around the various areas of the page like this "Edit Comment", for example -- but I'd like to see the comment listings styled more like the way they were, with bullets at the top level and a little extra space between threads. It just looks... wrong, somehow.
I'm pretty sure that storing void * pointers in (unsigned) longs is OK according to the spec
I'm not sure what you mean by "storing" there, but if you're talking about standard C and C++, you're almost certainly wrong in any case.
The sort of hackery you're talking about, assuming size equivalence between unrelated types and doing pointer arithmetic on a void*, might work in some predictable way on a particular platform. However, it's neither standard (the standards give very few guarantees about sizeof whatever_type, particularly where pointers are concerned), nor portable, nor a smart way to write your code.
Slashdot Mirror
It's strange that you have that experience, because we've ported several code bases of comparable size to the beta with no such difficulties. It took a few minutes to deal with warnings about deprecated functions, but there weren't many since in C++ there aren't many reasons to prefer C-style strings over a decent class anyway.
What were the errors you saw?
There's an easy workaround. What you do is this:
This handy snippet adapts readily to strings of any size, while still reporting the length of your string accurately using the safe
function.HTH. HAND. :-)
I think you have to bear in mind that Sunbird is a very immature product itself, and we're talking about 0.1 versions here. The dev team for Sunbird, unfortunately, seem to be almost non-existent, and have chosen to prioritise things like CalDAV. They're not, according to the last roadmap I looked at (a few weeks ago now, so check yourself if it matters to you) giving any particular time to Exchange compatibility at all. Which is a shame, because I bet the latter would be useful to far more people in practice.
And equally, because it's handy to have appointments automatically generate communications, e.g., to invite people to a meeting, log their reply, confirm with everyone that the meeting will go ahead once you've had all the replies back, and then issue a reminder automatically n minutes before the start time.
The fact that most of the guys here can do this sort of stuff (using Outlook/Exchange) and I can't (using TBird) means I can't actually book any of the company rooms for meetings, and other equally daft things. This isn't particularly a problem, and they humour me and my kind because we've been using alternatives since before Outlook became the office standard, but it would be useful to have the same functionality as everyone else, rather than just using TBird to escape the fatal data loss bugs in MS products that caused me to switch in the first place.
So I heard in the last thread on this subject, and a lot of people disagreed then, too. By all means try it, but don't bet your business on it; there were some pretty basic bugs in the beta I downloaded just over a week ago.
Which is why for common forms like breast cancer, there is a screening programme for those most likely to be at risk. The killer about cancer -- quite literally -- is usually finding it too late. The survival rates with sufficiently early diagnosis are very good for most forms of cancer today, even those that sadly remain mostly lethal by the time they are detected using obvious physical symptoms.
A reliable and readily administered detection mechanism for even most forms of cancer would probably save many thousands of lives every year.
Yep, she had several great quotes...
Sheridan: "You have a face people can trust."
Ivanova: "I would rather have a face people would fear."
Ivanova: "I know, I know. It's a Russian thing. When we're about to do something stupid, we like to catalog the full extent of our stupidity, for future reference"
Draal: "I like you. You're trouble!"
Ivanova: "Thank you. Nicest thing anyone's said about me in days."
Ivanova: "Good luck, Captain. I think you're about to go where everyone's gone before!"
And of course her defining moment for the entire series:
Ivanova: "Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andrei and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth... I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me."
I agree there's no particular reason for the strong characters to be male in sci-fi, but there are plenty of examples of strong female characters in recent shows. I'd extend your list somewhat:
Babylon 5 Ivanova (possibly the best female character in sci-fi ever) Delenn Elizabeth Lochley Star Trek + spin-offs Kira Nerys Kathryn Janeway Firefly Pretty much the whole female cast SG-1 + Atlantis Sam Carter Elizabeth Weir BSG (the new one) Starbuck Dr Who Rose TylerThose are the first few that come to mind, all of them not just strong female characters, but main fixtures of the biggest sci-fi series in recent years.
Sure. Hey, would you risk asking a gal like that out if you met her in a bar?
Oh, that's not what you meant...
I wonder whether posters like me fall under your "Microsoft apologist" heading. I hope not, but I guess if you read a thread where I defended them (because I happened to feel that the criticism was unjustified) and didn't read the threads where I slagged them off (because I happened to feel that they deserved slagging off) then you might get that idea.
What I've noticed in recent years is that the gap between the trolls and those wanting to have a reasonable discussion has widened, to the point that in many of the serious discussions, several participants will ultimately disagree quite amicably, but each with their own arguments for why they do so. One of the results of this is that the old, groupthink-style "Company X good, Company Y bad" arguments have become rather transparent, and anyone stating unfounded absolutes is likely to get called on it no matter which organisation they are (not) supporting. Some would say that's just provoking arguments; others would describe it as keeping an open mind.
And no, I don't work for Microsoft (though I've had interesting and helpful discussions with at least two Slashdot posters who openly do, and I do defend some of their products from what I see as unjustified criticism occasionally).
No, I'm sorry, but I can't believe you. Let's consider the implications of what you're proposing a little more deeply for a moment...
Here are a few reasons that's not really true:
Security Or rather, the complete lack of it that would be fundamentally necessary. How are you going to allow (safe) access to local resources like printers or disk storage if you're using a web-based app, with any current security model? On another front, how do you feel about trusting some unknown people supporting third party software you're running remotely with all the information you store in a financial application? Do you think it would be responsible for the HR department of a business to "outsource" their confidential personnel records to a third party application running remotely? Performance Regardless of the claims of the evangelists, it's pretty clear that average programming technique is getting sloppier according to something very close to "inverse Moore's law". As sure as night follows day, moving to a distributed software-as-a-service model will be the next great chance to reduce performance by an order of magnitude for pretty much no benefit whatsoever. Flexibility There is nothing you can do in a distributed application that you can't do locally, except distribute the data and processing. The value of these will inevitably vary with context. On the other hand, desktop software today has vastly more flexibility in terms of interaction design (and the security and performance issues I've mentioned already) than any distributed system ever will. If it takes a few seconds to download a Flash widget showing off some product on a manufacturer's web site, how long is it going to take to download the equivalent of a word processor or graphics manipulation tool every time I need to use one? Note that even major projects like Firefox can't take the hit of everyone downloading a new executable at once when an update comes out, and that's a relatively small application with a relatively small user base. Reliability Most places can't even keep a web site up 24/7/365; of those sites I read regularly, only the BBC have managed no major outings in the past year. Imagine the carnage that would ensue if some service software provider lost their connection, or got the equivalent of the Slashdot effect at 9am every morning as all the businesses in the time zone tried to download their updated office software for the day. Is your ISP 100% reliable in providing a connection, at the full theoretical bandwidth you're paying for, and trustworthy as far as cutting you off from the service in the event of, say, a false claim of abuse?There are any number of variations on these themes, but I think the whole software-as-a-service model is so flawed for most of today's typical desktop applications that the above should suffice to make the point.
The BBC have an article on the same theme today.
It's interesting that the article almost takes it as read that just about everything will become a service, and accepts the arguments from a senior marketing guy at a software-as-a-service firm apparently without question. I'm not sure I'd agree with that view; some applications have a lot of potential here, but AFAICS, others just... don't. What am I missing?
OK. I'm sure there must be someone somwhere who really does find more than one or two of the gizmos useful, and perhaps you're him. Fair enough.
Even so, I can't help noticing that your top-of-the-line phone is currently listed at around the $400 mark, give or take whatever special offer is running this week. If you'd only spent $50 on the phone, I wonder how much real computing hardware you could have bought, if you have a genuine use for the organiser and mathematical functions, and how much better at everything you describe it would be.
I very much doubt most people would miss them if they weren't there. In my whole life, surrounded by people with mobile phones, I have met one person who I've ever seen use his WAP browser. I have seen a calculator used on a mobile phone twice, and both times I'd worked out the correct answer in my head faster. You get the idea.
I think all this stuff is a triumph of marketing over necessity. How many people would really miss any of these features if they weren't there?
The two aren't equivalent. There's a huge difference between having a real PDA and some token naff organiser thing on a mobile phone. A real MP3 player would have far more capacity than the recently announced phones. A real calculator or computer system can blow away anything integrated into any phone I've ever seen. A real digital camera can produce vastly higher resolution images than any phone.
Even ignoring that, how often do people really need to take all of these things everywhere they go anyway? I don't see the convenience, nor even the novelty value, and apparently neither does pretty much everyone I know or walk past in the street.
Of course, time will tell which of us is right. I'll bet you a drink that when large parts of mobile phone networks start dying because all the 3G/4G devices running $MOBILE_OS got infected with a virus within minutes, people find giving up all the naff extras a small price to pay for being able to make a call when they need to.
An objective observer (which the various anti-virus people probably aren't) might ask why a mobile phone needs to become "more sophisticated" in the first place. My phone was a freebie about four years ago when I signed up, and still has way more features than I ever want or need.
Give me a good phone book feature, voice, text messaging and some sort of answerphone if I can't take a call. I don't need it to be a low quality digital camera, hard-to-use PDA, sub-standard web browser, trivial calculator, poor-capacity MP3 player, pathetically quiet alarm clock, and all the other junk. Nor do I need it to run some super-complicated operating system that's ripe for attacking.
That depends entirely on whether it's more likely that the supplier of your closed source product gives up or that you won't realistically be able to find your way around the source and fix a problem. Which do you think is the greater danger to an average user?
The big advantage of open source is that someone, somewhere probably has that skill and knowledge, and as long as one person is prepared to use it to benefit the community, everyone else is safe. Of course, if you lose the person/people who are willing to do this, you're no better off practically than you were losing a commercial supplier, source code or not.
Take a quick look around the major OSS projects, and you can see that this reliance on good samaritans works very well in some cases, but very poorly in others. In general, Joe User has to place a bet, and the best he can do is bank on the software he thinks will be safest.
With Firefox, 99.999% of users don't either. That's kinda my point. The fact that something is theoretically possible doesn't help much in the real world if almost no-one can do it in practice.
I'm afraid I have been unclear. I am not challenging the facts of your posts. I am simply saying that, for most people, they are irrelevant.
Within the first few minutes of this discussion starting, I lost track of the number of posters making smart-ass comments about how Firefox rocks compared to IE, because the patch was already out when the exploit hit. I nearly suffocated under the smugness coming off the geek brigades.
And yet, they (and, based on your most recent post, you) seem completely ignorant of the fact that nearly all security flaws in IE are patched well before exploits are found in the wild, too. Most (all?) of the major outbreaks that have hit mainstream media headlines in recent months would have been completely avoided if people had patched their systems; sometimes there were months before the exploits appeared.
So, if the Firefox patch was out but not applied, then the fact that it exists on a web site somewhere really doesn't matter to most people, and neither is it a particular advantage of Firefox over any alternative browser. This may not have been the point you were trying to make, and perhaps I picked the wrong initial post to reply to when making mine, but it's certainly a strange thing a lot of people around here today seem to believe.
Please go and read my post again. Manual updating doesn't pick up the patch either. The only way to get it if you're not in the first update wave is to find out about it independently and go get it from the web site.
It's also the major reason large numbers of huge companies aren't adopting Firefox, since it's the technology many of them base their Intranets on. It's a security risk when outside sites can use it, but not having it for internal pages is a PITA at times.
Sure. I imagine at least a dozen people in the world have the in-depth knowledge of the relevant area of the Firefox codebase, out of the hundreds of thousands or millions who now use it. Maybe I'll just go spend two weeks finding my way around myself, and become lucky 13.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but that argument is getting a bit tired these days.
Please note my comments earlier in the thread: since the patch hasn't hit the auto-updates yet, even if you check for it manually, this patch does not exist for most users. There is an exploit for it in the wild. Hence most Firefox users are not safe from this exploit.
There, I put the actually relevant bits in bold for you, just to make it clear. Firefox is a great product for many reasons, but let's not kid ourselves that its security policy is perfect right now, OK? If my Firefox browser had popped up within a few minutes of the patch being released and invited me to download it, you'd have had a case, but it didn't.
I have little time for browser wars, but it is notable that despite the 1.0.7 announcement even making Slashdot yesterday, it's not showing up as an automatic download yet. Worse, it doesn't show up even if you manually check for updates.
There's not much point patching a security issue if you can't distribute the patch and even conscientious users won't find out about it by the expected method.
I'm betting an awful lot of them will set all the classes for ads not to display...
Personally, I like a lot of the minor changes -- the boxes around the various areas of the page like this "Edit Comment", for example -- but I'd like to see the comment listings styled more like the way they were, with bullets at the top level and a little extra space between threads. It just looks... wrong, somehow.
I'm not sure what you mean by "storing" there, but if you're talking about standard C and C++, you're almost certainly wrong in any case.
The sort of hackery you're talking about, assuming size equivalence between unrelated types and doing pointer arithmetic on a void*, might work in some predictable way on a particular platform. However, it's neither standard (the standards give very few guarantees about sizeof whatever_type, particularly where pointers are concerned), nor portable, nor a smart way to write your code.