Probably 75% of IE's features aren't used by anybody. CSS is used by a lot more people, and here's the big kicker - IE's poor CSS support is the major obstacle to CSS support. Period. CSS fixed positioning addressed a common problem that lots of people had. I have no idea why MS decided that it wasn't important for IE, but DirectX based image filters were. Or MS Agent (thats like Clippy) support. If I thought I could get a real answer, I'd ask too.
There is no ROI in IE *at all*. None. It's given away as part of Windows. The only ROI is mindshare and platform locking, and if that's one reason why they haven't put more standards compliance into IE, I'd like to hear them say it. But they won't. And I wonder what your problem is too.
To be clear, there is *no* version of Qt for Windows under *any* open source license. The 2.3 version of Qt for windows is a binary non-commercial license. This, of course, will change with Qt 4.
That's fantastic... and check the URL in the ballon popup over it.
Re:No trying to troll but is safari ever better?
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 1
Gecko is tied very tightly to XUL. If anyone has managed to bind Gecko to anything without an XUL layer for that platform, I'd be really interested in hearing about it. Gecko is also dependent on XPCOM, which is it's own brand of heavy weight. KHTML is quite a bit smaller and faster than Gecko. However, it's not the sort of thing you'd see in the applications. I agree that Firefox vs Safari speed differences are probably due to XUL.
The thing, of course, is that the standard doesn't adress stuff like rich client content. It's not a matter of implementing something in a non-standard way, it's a matter of implementing something for which there is no standard. Add to that the need to overcome less than perfect standards support in the real world (no browser 100% perfect, all imperfect in various ways, IE most important to support but also least compliant).
So was I. Go read up a little on Lisp and trying using it, then you'll see why.
Are you seriously telling me that boostrapping a lisp environment (ie, writting a lisp implementation from scratch) is easier than targetting a VM?
Coming from someone who advocates Perl-related technologies, that is a ridiculous statement. Perl is a stellar example of how even the worst syntax can't keep a language from being used.Parrot doesn't have anything in common with Perl syntax. What the hell does "perl-related" have to do with anything?
First, I'd like you to take a deep breath. Then put down the Bill Joy doll. Then go re-read his post and realize that it talked about how it made implementing compilers easier, and that Parrot has nothing to do with the end-user or programming environments. Smalltalk, while a nice language, relies entirely too much on it's own graphical environment to ever see widespread adoption, especially now when there a languages equally as powerful without the limitation. Lisps awkward syntax (yes, yes, I know "it's not awkward, it's minmal!") will probably prevent it from ever really seeing mainstream use as well, although many of the concepts it pioneered are realized in other languages today.
+Where's the evidence "superior process and architecture"?
In part, the fact that those bugs lurk on bugzilla at all. I believe that, if you look at the history of the Firefox and Mozilla projects, you will see a generally superior pattern of response to security flaws as well as a generally more security-minded outlook. It's obviously not perfect, and nobody in thier right mind would claim it to be. On the other hand, I believe that Microsofts handling of security issues in IE borders on the criminally negligent, with *years* passing without critical updates. Note that you don't get the improved features in SP2 even if you're using supported, modern versions of Windows and IE, such as Windows 2000 or 2003. Tying *long* overdue security fixes to a service pack for a specific operating system is ridiculous.
+ Marketshare, Firefox has not "run the gauntlet".
(this is debatable, but the lack of commercial XPI extentions in general attests to this)
I'd say it's pretty obvious that Firefox doesn't have the marketshare of IE. Commercial XPI extensions don't have anything to do with it. I don't know what this has to do with my point, I believe that Firefox has the better model and the better responsiveness and both has and will deal better with threats than IE has, no matter how much marketshare they gain.
+ Secunia shows a number of unpatched Firefox flaws.
Actually, almost all of the flaws on Secunia have patches available. The main one that sticks out is the IDN thing, which is really a protocol level problem and there's no consensus on what a good solution is. Note the general severity of Firefox reported Firefox flaws vrs. the severity of IE flaws.
+ Whether people will upgrade promptly.
(the firefox auto-upgrade seems broken here)
It works fine for me, but this is a process problem that can't be totally solved in software. Firefox auto-update is as easy as Windows Update, I'd call this one a draw. Unpatched copies of Firefox will undoubtedly be a problem.
+ The XPI security improvements were copied straight from Internet Explorer
(somewhat true, XPSP2 features were known before Firefox even thought about this)
Certainly possible, I don't follow IE development especially closely so I only knew about them after the release. On the other hand, Firefox's improvements aren't tied to only Windows XP. MS certainly could have pushed them to all versions of IE, the fact that they didn't is an example of thier business concerns getting in the way of making a secure product and providing a better product. Point to Firefox for the better process here.
A good question and I'm not sure how exactly the whitelist is managed. That would come under the category of "whitelist hacks". The official mozilla update site uses SSL, so that should help in some cases. Perhaps the whitelist could be augmented to use an SSL fingerprint rather than just a domain name.
Yes, but nobody would actually do that because it would defeat the purpose of the deep-link, which is to *not host the image themselves*. It's a lousy way to prevent someone from spidering your site, but it's a really good (and effective) way of preventing deep-linking.
It's a whitelist, not a blacklist. By default, Firefox *will not* install extensions from anywhere except the Mozilla Update site. Period. It won't even ask. The default behavior is the most important, because as you mentioned people won't go out of thier way to change things. You don't have to "know" anything to use a whitelist.
Well, I don't spend a lot of time using IE. However, after installing a fresh install of Windows, then patching to SP2, I continued to get dialogs for ActiveX, although I get the yellow bar for popups.
Administrator user is actually prevented from an easy login on most XP machines.
This is untrue.
So the user you log into a XP machine with is in the equivalent of a user in the root or wheel group IMO...
This is mostly untrue, because being in the Administrator group in Windows gives you exactly the same abilities as the Administrator user account, with no extra step needed to escalate your own privledges.
Nonsense. The security of Firefox *has* been tested, and in fact holes have been found, and patched. To date, it has handled itself far better than IE has. For example, when malicious XPIs appeared, it was realized that the installation procedure was far too lenient and a new, superior, method was put into place within a single release (about a month, as I recall). IE has been plagued by the same category of bugs since the inception of ActiveX, and hasn't done a damn thing.
Firefox doesn't rely on security through obscurity. It relies on security through process and architectural improvements, the same way anything should. Nobody has made any claims of perfection, simple of a superior process and architecture coupled with a much faster response time. So far, that has proven to be true.
Er, no. The yellow bar is how IE shows *popups*. It does exactly the same thing with ActiveX controls that it always has. Yes, the devs like the UI and mimiced it, the alert was shown in the status bar before.
Firefox (and IE) download in the background while it's waiting for you to say what you want to do with the file. Unless you have a specific extensions explicitly set up to open without asking, though, it never should.
You don't have to click on a link to download a file, by the way (in either IE or Firefox, or indeed in any web browser). A JavaScript or even an HTTP redirect can be used to push a file to you.
Current versions of firefox don't allow this, unlike the (annoyingly easy to mis-click) ActiveX install dialog in IE. There's a whitelist for sites permitted to install extensions, which (by default) is limited to the offical Mozilla update site. Sites not in the whitelist won't even get a dialog, instead a yellow bar at the top of the screen appears, with a button you can use to access the whitelist and add the site. A site on the whitelist gets the standard dialog, which has a time-delay OK button to help prevent mis-clicks. There's no absolute way to prevent people from installing malicious extensions, but (assuming there's no bugs in, say, the whitelist implementation) Firefoxes current model is about as good as you could get.
Note that older versions of Firefox (and Mozilla) don't have the whitelist, and even older ones don't even have the dialog and are in fact vulnerable.
You didn't produce Open Source software, which they then used. You produced a work for hire (or maybe you just sold your copyright after the fact). Look here
for the OSI definition of Open Source.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what you did, mind - it's normal and the way that much software is produced. But it's not Open Source.
I don't know that this has ever happened, but it's not nearly as cut and dried as you imply. It would depend a great deal on whatever a court decided "distribution" was, and FSF aside, *most* copyright holders consider distribution within an organization to be real distribution. Try "internally distributing" a copy of Office, for example, or maybe setting up a centralized music server for your programmers to listen to. If it was "distributed" to the employee under the terms of the GPL, then he's well within his rights (under the GPL) to re-distribute it.
I'd just like to point out that what you did, while perfectly normal and reasonable, is not Open Source as defined by the OSI and commonly used here on Slashdot. What you did was a perfectly normal, not Open Source, selling of your product.
I think it's self evident that something besides MP3 would have been developed - likely not MP3 in it's exact form, of course. But you aren't proving the counter example, either - MP3 succeeded in spite of patent protection. Where's something that benefits society that succeeded because of the patent system?
You can go in all kinds of circles playing what if. I think that looking at the actual facts of what gets produced and who produces it is telling, though. The people who most directly create new software are overwhelmingly against software patents. The primary parties in favor of them are large IP cartels who stand to gain by manipulating the IP market. Even within these cartels, the actual engineers who do the creation are against these sorts of patents. It's trivial to point at patents that shouldn't have been granted and that retard the industry - and not just IT, but any industry. It's really hard to point at counterexamples, because despite rhetoric David vs. Goliath patent battles are vanishingly rare and even when they occur David rarely out and out wins. I'd say the burden of proof lies on the for-patent group, personally.
Why are you bitching at us? You need to go bitch to your mom, who bought the game. Vote with your dollars. You can even vote with other peoples dollars. Fuck you and your "forcing" other people to release things you think your little brother should have. Video games are an opt-in medium. Maybe you should wonder why your little brother likes the violence. Maybe the problem is that your little brother is a cretin who should be locked away so he doesn't pollute Good Kids(tm) with his nasty violent thoughts. Or maybe he's just a normal kid who's excited at the thought of the forbidden.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no ROI in IE *at all*. None. It's given away as part of Windows. The only ROI is mindshare and platform locking, and if that's one reason why they haven't put more standards compliance into IE, I'd like to hear them say it. But they won't. And I wonder what your problem is too.
To be clear, there is *no* version of Qt for Windows under *any* open source license. The 2.3 version of Qt for windows is a binary non-commercial license. This, of course, will change with Qt 4.
That's fantastic... and check the URL in the ballon popup over it.
Gecko is tied very tightly to XUL. If anyone has managed to bind Gecko to anything without an XUL layer for that platform, I'd be really interested in hearing about it. Gecko is also dependent on XPCOM, which is it's own brand of heavy weight. KHTML is quite a bit smaller and faster than Gecko. However, it's not the sort of thing you'd see in the applications. I agree that Firefox vs Safari speed differences are probably due to XUL.
IE actually had this functionality before, via the DHTML download behavior. They implemented the XMLHttpRequest for a compatible API.
The thing, of course, is that the standard doesn't adress stuff like rich client content. It's not a matter of implementing something in a non-standard way, it's a matter of implementing something for which there is no standard. Add to that the need to overcome less than perfect standards support in the real world (no browser 100% perfect, all imperfect in various ways, IE most important to support but also least compliant).
Are you seriously telling me that boostrapping a lisp environment (ie, writting a lisp implementation from scratch) is easier than targetting a VM?
Coming from someone who advocates Perl-related technologies, that is a ridiculous statement. Perl is a stellar example of how even the worst syntax can't keep a language from being used.Parrot doesn't have anything in common with Perl syntax. What the hell does "perl-related" have to do with anything?
First, I'd like you to take a deep breath. Then put down the Bill Joy doll. Then go re-read his post and realize that it talked about how it made implementing compilers easier, and that Parrot has nothing to do with the end-user or programming environments. Smalltalk, while a nice language, relies entirely too much on it's own graphical environment to ever see widespread adoption, especially now when there a languages equally as powerful without the limitation. Lisps awkward syntax (yes, yes, I know "it's not awkward, it's minmal!") will probably prevent it from ever really seeing mainstream use as well, although many of the concepts it pioneered are realized in other languages today.
In part, the fact that those bugs lurk on bugzilla at all. I believe that, if you look at the history of the Firefox and Mozilla projects, you will see a generally superior pattern of response to security flaws as well as a generally more security-minded outlook. It's obviously not perfect, and nobody in thier right mind would claim it to be. On the other hand, I believe that Microsofts handling of security issues in IE borders on the criminally negligent, with *years* passing without critical updates. Note that you don't get the improved features in SP2 even if you're using supported, modern versions of Windows and IE, such as Windows 2000 or 2003. Tying *long* overdue security fixes to a service pack for a specific operating system is ridiculous.
+ Marketshare, Firefox has not "run the gauntlet". (this is debatable, but the lack of commercial XPI extentions in general attests to this)
I'd say it's pretty obvious that Firefox doesn't have the marketshare of IE. Commercial XPI extensions don't have anything to do with it. I don't know what this has to do with my point, I believe that Firefox has the better model and the better responsiveness and both has and will deal better with threats than IE has, no matter how much marketshare they gain.
+ Secunia shows a number of unpatched Firefox flaws.
Actually, almost all of the flaws on Secunia have patches available. The main one that sticks out is the IDN thing, which is really a protocol level problem and there's no consensus on what a good solution is. Note the general severity of Firefox reported Firefox flaws vrs. the severity of IE flaws.
+ Whether people will upgrade promptly. (the firefox auto-upgrade seems broken here)
It works fine for me, but this is a process problem that can't be totally solved in software. Firefox auto-update is as easy as Windows Update, I'd call this one a draw. Unpatched copies of Firefox will undoubtedly be a problem.
+ The XPI security improvements were copied straight from Internet Explorer (somewhat true, XPSP2 features were known before Firefox even thought about this)
Certainly possible, I don't follow IE development especially closely so I only knew about them after the release. On the other hand, Firefox's improvements aren't tied to only Windows XP. MS certainly could have pushed them to all versions of IE, the fact that they didn't is an example of thier business concerns getting in the way of making a secure product and providing a better product. Point to Firefox for the better process here.
Violets are actually much closer to #994ae3.
A good question and I'm not sure how exactly the whitelist is managed. That would come under the category of "whitelist hacks". The official mozilla update site uses SSL, so that should help in some cases. Perhaps the whitelist could be augmented to use an SSL fingerprint rather than just a domain name.
Yes, but nobody would actually do that because it would defeat the purpose of the deep-link, which is to *not host the image themselves*. It's a lousy way to prevent someone from spidering your site, but it's a really good (and effective) way of preventing deep-linking.
It's a whitelist, not a blacklist. By default, Firefox *will not* install extensions from anywhere except the Mozilla Update site. Period. It won't even ask. The default behavior is the most important, because as you mentioned people won't go out of thier way to change things. You don't have to "know" anything to use a whitelist.
Well, I don't spend a lot of time using IE. However, after installing a fresh install of Windows, then patching to SP2, I continued to get dialogs for ActiveX, although I get the yellow bar for popups.
This is untrue.
So the user you log into a XP machine with is in the equivalent of a user in the root or wheel group IMO...
This is mostly untrue, because being in the Administrator group in Windows gives you exactly the same abilities as the Administrator user account, with no extra step needed to escalate your own privledges.
Firefox doesn't rely on security through obscurity. It relies on security through process and architectural improvements, the same way anything should. Nobody has made any claims of perfection, simple of a superior process and architecture coupled with a much faster response time. So far, that has proven to be true.
Er, no. The yellow bar is how IE shows *popups*. It does exactly the same thing with ActiveX controls that it always has. Yes, the devs like the UI and mimiced it, the alert was shown in the status bar before.
You don't have to click on a link to download a file, by the way (in either IE or Firefox, or indeed in any web browser). A JavaScript or even an HTTP redirect can be used to push a file to you.
Windows Media Player is also an infection vector for spyware, especially WMVs. Perhaps thats where it came from?
Note that older versions of Firefox (and Mozilla) don't have the whitelist, and even older ones don't even have the dialog and are in fact vulnerable.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what you did, mind - it's normal and the way that much software is produced. But it's not Open Source.
I don't know that this has ever happened, but it's not nearly as cut and dried as you imply. It would depend a great deal on whatever a court decided "distribution" was, and FSF aside, *most* copyright holders consider distribution within an organization to be real distribution. Try "internally distributing" a copy of Office, for example, or maybe setting up a centralized music server for your programmers to listen to. If it was "distributed" to the employee under the terms of the GPL, then he's well within his rights (under the GPL) to re-distribute it.
I'd just like to point out that what you did, while perfectly normal and reasonable, is not Open Source as defined by the OSI and commonly used here on Slashdot. What you did was a perfectly normal, not Open Source, selling of your product.
You can go in all kinds of circles playing what if. I think that looking at the actual facts of what gets produced and who produces it is telling, though. The people who most directly create new software are overwhelmingly against software patents. The primary parties in favor of them are large IP cartels who stand to gain by manipulating the IP market. Even within these cartels, the actual engineers who do the creation are against these sorts of patents. It's trivial to point at patents that shouldn't have been granted and that retard the industry - and not just IT, but any industry. It's really hard to point at counterexamples, because despite rhetoric David vs. Goliath patent battles are vanishingly rare and even when they occur David rarely out and out wins. I'd say the burden of proof lies on the for-patent group, personally.
Why are you bitching at us? You need to go bitch to your mom, who bought the game. Vote with your dollars. You can even vote with other peoples dollars. Fuck you and your "forcing" other people to release things you think your little brother should have. Video games are an opt-in medium. Maybe you should wonder why your little brother likes the violence. Maybe the problem is that your little brother is a cretin who should be locked away so he doesn't pollute Good Kids(tm) with his nasty violent thoughts. Or maybe he's just a normal kid who's excited at the thought of the forbidden.