no that would not be a logical conclusion, that would be bad design. because its "simulated" you can bend the rules towards a better solution rather than inheriting the physical attributes that give a system limitations in the real-world. think the matrix...;)
do you always know what CD you want to play? i've got one of those big CD sleeve case things that stores about 100-odd discs. often when i'm in the car i'll open it onto my lap and flip through the pages until something i see catches my eye and then in the CD player it goes.
i'm also really not into this statement: Linux does not need some fancy graphics on the desktop to make an impact.
my best friend just brought his "regular user" wife a Mac and she just loves it. why, pretty big chunky graphics and well executed user interface. the current trend in UI design is "task-orientation" which is essentially articulating features tucked away in File-> View-> right,click etc... in a more human interface. i don't disagree with you that one should also have search capabilities, but don't right off the average joe user who is impressed and enjoys such graphics - they are the majority and they are the ones who will buy/install and make linux on the desktop gain usage.
no, i would say that was quite different. Bob was a user interface designed around a metaphoric real-world office. this demo from sun predominantly lends 3D properties to windows so that you can, for example (in the dvemo) flip oer your Mozilla window and write a little note on the back of it.
admittidly there are other real-world capabilities that they demonstrate - for example the cd catalogue they use; but in general its very different to Bob.
you raise a good point. if the domain is paid up-front and the company goes bust, would the name then be released. i'm guessing it would go up for sale depending on how the company was wound-down.
this could lead to a number of "accidently parked" names.
ah, i failed to mention... the french-speaking Belgians! my best friend from high school was actually an exchange student who liked it so much he stayed on for 3 years.
i went to go and visit him last year in brussels and i met many of his friends. thank god i can speak french because they certainly couldn't speak very much english. but the flemish are excellent english speakers (as are the Dutch - similar languages). the really interesting thing is, when i did business in brussels in the IT-sector the majority of the IT-guys were both flemish and english speakers. there is quite a big cultural divide between the two.
because of my friend, my associatians with belgium is always the french-speakers. so good point!
i wasn't trying to be a troll, i like to try and play devil's advocate in these sort or arguments as i'm very fond of the open source community, but work in a very MS-centric environment and see the commercial realities of what they are doing - which horrifies me on a daily basis!
i enjoyed many of your responses and the time you took to do so.
disclaimer: i run both windows and freebsd + linux and have done for years. as much as i support the open source community and dislike MS's strong-arm anti-competitive strategies, i do feel sometimes one gets carried away with very a very isolated view on certain real-world scenarios.
so here goes:
1. "The Internet is powered by open source."
Sorry, but this statement is a little too broad. As far as I am aware (and I'm open to being proven wrong - bait!) a large amount of "The Internet" is powered by Cisco routers which run the proprietary operating system IOS. I accept that there are a large amount of Sendmail/Postfix/Exim/Qmail boxes around pushing email, but there are also a hell of a lot of MS Exchange Servers and IBM Lotus servers pushing email as well powering corporate email. Also MS represents around 1/4 of web servers on the Net. So, like I said, a very bold generalisation.
2. "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
As it is for proprietary systems.
3. "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
That is because open source is largely decentralised. Business itself is decentralising to some degree (although not to the same level as Open Source - but this can be as much a strength as a presumed weakness).
4. "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
This is the one that erks me the most. Lets take a look at the nuts and bolts of the O/S rather than the user interaction. There have been probably (if someone has stats, I would love to see them) as many Linux (think SSH + FTP + Telnet etc...) exploits out there as there have been on Windows (think IIS). The more the Linux front-end bloats like Windows has over the years and the more "features" that get added to various products introduce security risks.
The fact that the source is open means that people can exploit it rather than by trial and error or just hacking around than by actually analysing the source and finding weaknesses in it like people did with the Windows leaked source code.
Most of the bad security press (especially recently) has been Outlook (Express) based Worms and this was do to introducing a good idea (feature) that turned sour. Could just as easily happen in the Open Source community, but due to lack of penetration (he said penetration) it has never cascaded into something as far-reaching as MS's security woes have in this regards.
5. "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
Personally I'm big into this! I feel that the potential for Europe to regain power and all of that is pretty massive. However, outside of the USA there is one big problem - language. You may think that this is getting better - go to Brussels, goto Barcelona and see how many 20-30 year olds speak English; not many.
6. "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
At our (proprietary) office peer respect amongst coders is pretty high too. Are we an exception?
7. "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
"He doth stride the world like a colossus...". What if the giants jump up and down and shake you off? Sorry I just don't get this - anyone care to explain?
8. "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
As does Windows. And don't say the free thing because RedHat Advanced Server and all of the other commercial guys also charge for their server distros. And then you want support, and then you have to have certified engineers. I've seen too many contrary ROI models to not prove anything here.
9. "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
Fair enough. Although consider Symbian. Also consider that MS have not been big on an embedded device strategy until recently. We all know what happens when MS starts taken an interest in something - and of all people M
really... if i remember correctly, the iPod initially DID NOT support the windows platform. it was a decision made later to milk the iPod cash-cow when they realised (funnily enough) that people weren't running out and buying mac's to hook up to their ipods.
so i believe that the iPod has been successful in a way that Apple DID NOT intend and i think the authors of the article would be happier if apple had sold 1 million iBook's shortly after the release of the iPod...
i'm sorry but i don't buy this performance thing as much as you (and others) sell it.
i've got two old boxen at home. one is a 500-odd MHZ Celeron which runs Linux and serves as my router/firewall/mail/apache (the usual basically). i know the kits old, but the performance i get out of it isn't that impressive.
but wait... i'll actually COMPARE something now!
i've also got an oldish 700 odd MHZ Pentium III (i think). this is my desktop box. i've always been a linux on server, winblows on desktop purely because of historical work purposes (Photoshop, VS.Net etc...). so that box used to run 2k, and then XP for a while. then i discovered both VMWare and CrossOver which allow me to run anything I want to. so i trashed my windows parition completely and installed RH 9 on it...
believe me, there is hardly any noticable performance difference between the two - and i'm not talking about running Photoshop in CrossOver or VS.NET in VMware - those are bound to be slower. i'm just talking normal X stuff. moving windows around the screen, finding files, launching small apps etc... there is no obviously noticeable performance differences between the two.
and with regards to your JAVA comments, yes I actually have. SWING/AWT USED to be pretty slow. since 1.3 and especially in 1.4 the "snappyness" of the UI interfaces have improved dramatically. go get a 1.4 JRE/JDK and run IntelliJ (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/) and you will discover that it runs just as quickly as any native linux IDE - and by IDE i'm not talking frikking vi here...
given his example: cd/work/foo rm -rf bar cp -r/fresh/data
would this not suffice: cd/work/foo && rm -rf bar && cp -r/fresh/data
my undertanding of && was that it only executes in the previous command didn't throw some sort of error. i understand its not as powerful as what he's talking about, but there is some degree of fault tolerance there.
secondly, i don't know about you, but i would be very uncomfortable with something that tries a few thousand times or for a particular amount of time - it could really lock up threads or disk IO quite sunstantially if not well considered.
often what happens when they translate and dub anime is that the translation is compromised so that the sound fits in with the mouth movement - i'm not talking exactly here, by example...
perhaps in Japanese someone can say "waaachaaa" and in English it actually means "hey how you doing, gee i haven't seen you in ages". so the dubbers will reduce the english to match the amount of time taken to say "waaachaa" and will come up with something like "hello". extend that to cultural references and more in-depth conversations and you begin to understand that watching a dubbed version of an anime is perhaps not a great idea if you're after good dialogue.
i saw GITS first in English, twice as that was the only VHS version available to me. i then got it on DVD and watched it with subtitles where they tend not to compromise (although some subtitles can be awfully done!). the film took on an entirely different meaning to me - a lot of the "side scenes" (for example the apparantly random scene of the old dude getting out of the helicopter) actually made sense to me!
one great example of rectifying this was Princess Mononoke where the entire edit was redone based on a translation from the brilliant Neil Gaiman. here Gaiman not only correctly translated the film, but he also adapted some of the metaphors and cultural references so that they had a western spin on them. the film was then re-edited so that the mouths matched his translation. watch it, its fantastic - don't get put off by the Disney'esque animation: after about 4 minutes of Bambi-like scenes evil monsters begin to appear and then someone has his head knocked off with an arrow...but its more than just that, it includes some fabulous human dichotomy and awesome fantasy scenses.
so that may be one reason you haven't enjoyed your anime experience. the other is perhaps you've watched the wrong ones. most of the "famous" ones are more action orientated (Akira, GITS, Ninja Scroll). you may wish to watch something more dramatic like Grave of the Fireflies. personally it was far to slow for my liking, you may enjoy it or find similar anime that isn't all just blood & guts.
"Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands."
yeah, so you choose to buy 6 Stella's from your local and next minute you've got the Budweiser SWAT team outside your house shoving their piss-poor beverage down your throat? do people not see the benefits to the consumer in these instances?
i mean if bud found that people preferred to buy beers nice and cold, then they may insist that all vendors have well-chilled bud-branded fridges FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE! but no, the SWAT team will get you.
2. What's to prevent you from burning LOTS of these CDs and giving them to friends?
You may say "well I can do that today", but you can't as you don't have an original CD of "just about every song ever released". What you are proposing would give pirates very easy access to illegaly copy just about every song...
An X server is still nice for remote display situations, but honestly: Who does that anymore (and could they not be accomodated with VNC)?
my understanding of the X server idea is that it sends drawing co-ordinates and such rather than a BMP-style screengrab that VNC sends. is this correct?
if so...it should be faster than VNC, right? so that would be pretty useful to me or any terminal-service like environment.
Firstly, install Firefox and then go to, say, http://www.simsnow.com which has flash on the front page. In IE I would get a dialog saying "do you want to install this now". I click "Yes", I have flash. Instead I was taken off to download something, which I did and I installed it. I restarted Firebird - still not flash. What I ended up doing was copying the plug-ins from my old Firebird installation into Firefox's plug-ins directory and then it was fine.
Secondly, it has crashed twice today on Windows XP. Firebird crashed about once a day - and it wasn't page rendering. I would do this: * Open the Browser (blank page loads) * I click on my "news and daily" folder link to goto Slashdot * Firebird/fox hangs
Thirdly. The plug-in installer is totally cool - but its too hidden. As a seasoned computer user it still took me 5-10 minutes to figure out how to install the Google toolbar in Firefox - even though I'd done it before in Firebird.
Fouth - and this one is the sh*t one. Although it may be more "standard compliant", it is not as forgiving as IE in terms of bad HTML. I still get many sites that don't work in Mozilla - and because I know how HTML works and know the whole history behind W3C compatability standards I'll launch IE and look at the site with that. my mother would probably think the website was screwed. The sad fact of the matter is that there are a myriad of WYSIWYG HTML authoring tools that produde non-compliant HTML and to use the argument that they should fix their problems and Mozilla is god because it adheres to standards is horribly narrow-minded.
My comment perhpas paints a picture more bleak than the reality. Personally I love using Firebird/fox in general, especially for its rendering spped - but I'm quite sure my mother would find the "immersive internet experience" of IE more pleasurable.
Also this whole Mozilla/Netscape/Firebird thing is really confusing me - and perhaps others. Why doesn't the Mozilla team commit a bit more resource towards polish and user experience and produce a single primary browser with some more bells and whistles and sell/give that away. I believe that Netscape is supposed to be this, I think, but after my experiences with older versions of Netscape I really wouldn't install that.
ah well spotted - i did actually change the default zip directory. obviously with firebird being a binary-only extraction they didn't create any registry entries to keep track of where it is installed.
i now have 3 installed versions of mozilla browsers on my machine - and that is just stupid. every time they branch the bloody code or rename the browser i get another instance of a browser on my machine. i then have to change my shortcuts on the quicklaunch toolbar, reinstall google toolbar, and manually move all of my links across from firebird to firefox. luckily i found that i could drag and drop them from Manage Bookmarks - but to the novice user that may not be obvious at all. the drawback to this is that i use folders to group my links and i'm used to the order they were presented in previously. i can drag url links around the link bar to change their position - but for some reason I can't do it with folder links.
so if any Mozilla developer reads this: please speak to your windows installer guys and add some custom actions into your install pack that will provide a seamless upgrade path for those wishing to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
no that would not be a logical conclusion, that would be bad design. because its "simulated" you can bend the rules towards a better solution rather than inheriting the physical attributes that give a system limitations in the real-world. think the matrix... ;)
do you always know what CD you want to play? i've got one of those big CD sleeve case things that stores about 100-odd discs. often when i'm in the car i'll open it onto my lap and flip through the pages until something i see catches my eye and then in the CD player it goes.
i'm also really not into this statement:
Linux does not need some fancy graphics on the desktop to make an impact.
my best friend just brought his "regular user" wife a Mac and she just loves it. why, pretty big chunky graphics and well executed user interface. the current trend in UI design is "task-orientation" which is essentially articulating features tucked away in File-> View-> right,click etc... in a more human interface. i don't disagree with you that one should also have search capabilities, but don't right off the average joe user who is impressed and enjoys such graphics - they are the majority and they are the ones who will buy/install and make linux on the desktop gain usage.
no, i would say that was quite different. Bob was a user interface designed around a metaphoric real-world office. this demo from sun predominantly lends 3D properties to windows so that you can, for example (in the dvemo) flip oer your Mozilla window and write a little note on the back of it.
admittidly there are other real-world capabilities that they demonstrate - for example the cd catalogue they use; but in general its very different to Bob.
you raise a good point. if the domain is paid up-front and the company goes bust, would the name then be released. i'm guessing it would go up for sale depending on how the company was wound-down.
this could lead to a number of "accidently parked" names.
ah, i failed to mention... the french-speaking Belgians! my best friend from high school was actually an exchange student who liked it so much he stayed on for 3 years.
i went to go and visit him last year in brussels and i met many of his friends. thank god i can speak french because they certainly couldn't speak very much english. but the flemish are excellent english speakers (as are the Dutch - similar languages). the really interesting thing is, when i did business in brussels in the IT-sector the majority of the IT-guys were both flemish and english speakers. there is quite a big cultural divide between the two.
because of my friend, my associatians with belgium is always the french-speakers. so good point!
;)
i wasn't trying to be a troll, i like to try and play devil's advocate in these sort or arguments as i'm very fond of the open source community, but work in a very MS-centric environment and see the commercial realities of what they are doing - which horrifies me on a daily basis!
i enjoyed many of your responses and the time you took to do so.
cheers
disclaimer: i run both windows and freebsd + linux and have done for years. as much as i support the open source community and dislike MS's strong-arm anti-competitive strategies, i do feel sometimes one gets carried away with very a very isolated view on certain real-world scenarios.
so here goes:
1. "The Internet is powered by open source."
Sorry, but this statement is a little too broad. As far as I am aware (and I'm open to being proven wrong - bait!) a large amount of "The Internet" is powered by Cisco routers which run the proprietary operating system IOS. I accept that there are a large amount of Sendmail/Postfix/Exim/Qmail boxes around pushing email, but there are also a hell of a lot of MS Exchange Servers and IBM Lotus servers pushing email as well powering corporate email. Also MS represents around 1/4 of web servers on the Net. So, like I said, a very bold generalisation.
2. "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
As it is for proprietary systems.
3. "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
That is because open source is largely decentralised. Business itself is decentralising to some degree (although not to the same level as Open Source - but this can be as much a strength as a presumed weakness).
4. "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
This is the one that erks me the most. Lets take a look at the nuts and bolts of the O/S rather than the user interaction. There have been probably (if someone has stats, I would love to see them) as many Linux (think SSH + FTP + Telnet etc...) exploits out there as there have been on Windows (think IIS). The more the Linux front-end bloats like Windows has over the years and the more "features" that get added to various products introduce security risks.
The fact that the source is open means that people can exploit it rather than by trial and error or just hacking around than by actually analysing the source and finding weaknesses in it like people did with the Windows leaked source code.
Most of the bad security press (especially recently) has been Outlook (Express) based Worms and this was do to introducing a good idea (feature) that turned sour. Could just as easily happen in the Open Source community, but due to lack of penetration (he said penetration) it has never cascaded into something as far-reaching as MS's security woes have in this regards.
5. "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
Personally I'm big into this! I feel that the potential for Europe to regain power and all of that is pretty massive. However, outside of the USA there is one big problem - language. You may think that this is getting better - go to Brussels, goto Barcelona and see how many 20-30 year olds speak English; not many.
6. "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
At our (proprietary) office peer respect amongst coders is pretty high too. Are we an exception?
7. "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
"He doth stride the world like a colossus...". What if the giants jump up and down and shake you off? Sorry I just don't get this - anyone care to explain?
8. "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
As does Windows. And don't say the free thing because RedHat Advanced Server and all of the other commercial guys also charge for their server distros. And then you want support, and then you have to have certified engineers. I've seen too many contrary ROI models to not prove anything here.
9. "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
Fair enough. Although consider Symbian. Also consider that MS have not been big on an embedded device strategy until recently. We all know what happens when MS starts taken an interest in something - and of all people M
No, they are looking at buying the AOL unit from AOL TW - not the whole thing.
really...
if i remember correctly, the iPod initially DID NOT support the windows platform. it was a decision made later to milk the iPod cash-cow when they realised (funnily enough) that people weren't running out and buying mac's to hook up to their ipods.
so i believe that the iPod has been successful in a way that Apple DID NOT intend and i think the authors of the article would be happier if apple had sold 1 million iBook's shortly after the release of the iPod...
I am so shocked that you see that as a good thing.
gtkpod does sync entire library and playlists.
It's about time gnome had a good ipod solution.
gtkpod
does the job for me just perfectly.
i'm sorry but i don't buy this performance thing as much as you (and others) sell it.
i've got two old boxen at home. one is a 500-odd MHZ Celeron which runs Linux and serves as my router/firewall/mail/apache (the usual basically). i know the kits old, but the performance i get out of it isn't that impressive.
but wait... i'll actually COMPARE something now!
i've also got an oldish 700 odd MHZ Pentium III (i think). this is my desktop box. i've always been a linux on server, winblows on desktop purely because of historical work purposes (Photoshop, VS.Net etc...). so that box used to run 2k, and then XP for a while. then i discovered both VMWare and CrossOver which allow me to run anything I want to. so i trashed my windows parition completely and installed RH 9 on it...
believe me, there is hardly any noticable performance difference between the two - and i'm not talking about running Photoshop in CrossOver or VS.NET in VMware - those are bound to be slower. i'm just talking normal X stuff. moving windows around the screen, finding files, launching small apps etc... there is no obviously noticeable performance differences between the two.
and with regards to your JAVA comments, yes I actually have. SWING/AWT USED to be pretty slow. since 1.3 and especially in 1.4 the "snappyness" of the UI interfaces have improved dramatically. go get a 1.4 JRE/JDK and run IntelliJ (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/) and you will discover that it runs just as quickly as any native linux IDE - and by IDE i'm not talking frikking vi here...
given his example: /work/foo /fresh/data
/work/foo && rm -rf bar && cp -r /fresh/data
cd
rm -rf bar
cp -r
would this not suffice:
cd
my undertanding of && was that it only executes in the previous command didn't throw some sort of error. i understand its not as powerful as what he's talking about, but there is some degree of fault tolerance there.
secondly, i don't know about you, but i would be very uncomfortable with something that tries a few thousand times or for a particular amount of time - it could really lock up threads or disk IO quite sunstantially if not well considered.
whath them in japanese with subtitles.
often what happens when they translate and dub anime is that the translation is compromised so that the sound fits in with the mouth movement - i'm not talking exactly here, by example...
perhaps in Japanese someone can say "waaachaaa" and in English it actually means "hey how you doing, gee i haven't seen you in ages". so the dubbers will reduce the english to match the amount of time taken to say "waaachaa" and will come up with something like "hello". extend that to cultural references and more in-depth conversations and you begin to understand that watching a dubbed version of an anime is perhaps not a great idea if you're after good dialogue.
i saw GITS first in English, twice as that was the only VHS version available to me. i then got it on DVD and watched it with subtitles where they tend not to compromise (although some subtitles can be awfully done!). the film took on an entirely different meaning to me - a lot of the "side scenes" (for example the apparantly random scene of the old dude getting out of the helicopter) actually made sense to me!
one great example of rectifying this was Princess Mononoke where the entire edit was redone based on a translation from the brilliant Neil Gaiman. here Gaiman not only correctly translated the film, but he also adapted some of the metaphors and cultural references so that they had a western spin on them. the film was then re-edited so that the mouths matched his translation. watch it, its fantastic - don't get put off by the Disney'esque animation: after about 4 minutes of Bambi-like scenes evil monsters begin to appear and then someone has his head knocked off with an arrow...but its more than just that, it includes some fabulous human dichotomy and awesome fantasy scenses.
so that may be one reason you haven't enjoyed your anime experience. the other is perhaps you've watched the wrong ones. most of the "famous" ones are more action orientated (Akira, GITS, Ninja Scroll). you may wish to watch something more dramatic like Grave of the Fireflies. personally it was far to slow for my liking, you may enjoy it or find similar anime that isn't all just blood & guts.
"Frankly, I don't want Budweiser knowing when I choose to buy their beer versus another brands."
yeah, so you choose to buy 6 Stella's from your local and next minute you've got the Budweiser SWAT team outside your house shoving their piss-poor beverage down your throat? do people not see the benefits to the consumer in these instances?
i mean if bud found that people preferred to buy beers nice and cold, then they may insist that all vendors have well-chilled bud-branded fridges FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE! but no, the SWAT team will get you.
YOU ARE FROM GOD!
;)
+10000 karma to you.
oh. wait i just ran it - how much does it suck?! slow and well, just slow. thanks anyway though
The problem "they" will cite..
:S
2. What's to prevent you from burning LOTS of these CDs and giving them to friends?
You may say "well I can do that today", but you can't as you don't have an original CD of "just about every song ever released". What you are proposing would give pirates very easy access to illegaly copy just about every song...
This is why "they" are all pushing DRM
An X server is still nice for remote display situations, but honestly: Who does that anymore (and could they not be accomodated with VNC)?
my understanding of the X server idea is that it sends drawing co-ordinates and such rather than a BMP-style screengrab that VNC sends. is this correct?
if so...it should be faster than VNC, right? so that would be pretty useful to me or any terminal-service like environment.
well, isn't morse code essentially a binary stream of ons and offs to represent communication data?
if you think about it, all data is effectively delivered through Morse code.
Firstly, install Firefox and then go to, say, http://www.simsnow.com which has flash on the front page. In IE I would get a dialog saying "do you want to install this now". I click "Yes", I have flash. Instead I was taken off to download something, which I did and I installed it. I restarted Firebird - still not flash. What I ended up doing was copying the plug-ins from my old Firebird installation into Firefox's plug-ins directory and then it was fine.
Secondly, it has crashed twice today on Windows XP. Firebird crashed about once a day - and it wasn't page rendering. I would do this:
* Open the Browser
(blank page loads)
* I click on my "news and daily" folder link to goto Slashdot
* Firebird/fox hangs
Thirdly. The plug-in installer is totally cool - but its too hidden. As a seasoned computer user it still took me 5-10 minutes to figure out how to install the Google toolbar in Firefox - even though I'd done it before in Firebird.
Fouth - and this one is the sh*t one. Although it may be more "standard compliant", it is not as forgiving as IE in terms of bad HTML. I still get many sites that don't work in Mozilla - and because I know how HTML works and know the whole history behind W3C compatability standards I'll launch IE and look at the site with that. my mother would probably think the website was screwed. The sad fact of the matter is that there are a myriad of WYSIWYG HTML authoring tools that produde non-compliant HTML and to use the argument that they should fix their problems and Mozilla is god because it adheres to standards is horribly narrow-minded.
My comment perhpas paints a picture more bleak than the reality. Personally I love using Firebird/fox in general, especially for its rendering spped - but I'm quite sure my mother would find the "immersive internet experience" of IE more pleasurable.
Also this whole Mozilla/Netscape/Firebird thing is really confusing me - and perhaps others. Why doesn't the Mozilla team commit a bit more resource towards polish and user experience and produce a single primary browser with some more bells and whistles and sell/give that away. I believe that Netscape is supposed to be this, I think, but after my experiences with older versions of Netscape I really wouldn't install that.
then after they release Episode 3 they will release a brand new uber box with 1-6 in it. and out go all the fanatics and but that one as well!
ah well spotted - i did actually change the default zip directory. obviously with firebird being a binary-only extraction they didn't create any registry entries to keep track of where it is installed.
ok sorry, but gripe time...
(disclaimer: this is on my winblows box at work)
i now have 3 installed versions of mozilla browsers on my machine - and that is just stupid. every time they branch the bloody code or rename the browser i get another instance of a browser on my machine. i then have to change my shortcuts on the quicklaunch toolbar, reinstall google toolbar, and manually move all of my links across from firebird to firefox. luckily i found that i could drag and drop them from Manage Bookmarks - but to the novice user that may not be obvious at all. the drawback to this is that i use folders to group my links and i'm used to the order they were presented in previously. i can drag url links around the link bar to change their position - but for some reason I can't do it with folder links.
so if any Mozilla developer reads this: please speak to your windows installer guys and add some custom actions into your install pack that will provide a seamless upgrade path for those wishing to do so.