What Telecom fails to recognise is that these people are pushing the envelope of what the Internet can do, and will drive the technology economy in years to come.
No! The people who invented P2P apps maybe are pushing the envelope of what the net can do - but 95% of the people on the biggest P2P networks are just downloading free music. They're not pushing anything other than their luck, because they're basically massively abusing the system.
I'd love to be in NZ right now! Now all the kiddies that think downloading music and burning it to CDs for their friends constitutes a "business" - like some people I know - have had their access blocked, it means better connections for everyone else who does in fact respect the law. I think this should happen more.
I think you don't understand when vi is useful. I use it all the time for editing config files etc on the command line because it starts... instantly. I hate it's wierd syntax etc and I'm getting to like Pico, but seriously, when you just want to make a quick mod to a text file, there's nothing better.
Oh - and as for "Visual Studio.NET bombs the linux developer back into the stone age", bah humbug I say! I moved to Linux because developing software is much easier with it, with Windows unless you fork out hundreds of dollars for a does-everything IDE it's a nightmare to write even the simplest of programs! VS.NET doesn't bomb nothing
As part of the development of Genio which later turned into PingID we looked at XNS extensively.
However, their technology is deeply flawed, not just in an engineering sense but also a legal one: it is tied down by patents and IP disputes, and their system is essentially centralised.
They also have almost nobody on board at all, you can get an XNS "agent" but not use it anywhere. The technology is ludicrously complicated, hidden behind masses of white papers that don't really tell you what to do in order to make an implementation.
Yep, definately something like PingID, which I'm now helping out with. These guys are smart, and have some big names involved. They want to do it right, the protocols involved with the Digital ID system we're developing will be submitted to the W3C.
Anyway, I got involved through my earlier work with Genio, which was a complete open source system not just for personal data storage but also single-sign-on, a la Passport.
Although Hyatt has a good point about everyone wanting something different, he then goes on to praise mpt's top ten usability problems! This smacks of hypocrisy to me, as many of his "usability problems" seem to be simply I don't like this.
For instance, not having the Home link on the toolbar seems to be his pet hate, but many people have pointed out that it makes more sense for it to be put there, and Home isn't used all that often anyway. He says "menus are the most confusing UI element" and they should be limited to 2 levels deep at max, but millions of people every day use the Start Menu, which can easily go 5 or 6 levels deep. I never heard anyone complain about menus being too hard to use.
I often see this with Mac users (of which both mpt and hyatt are devotees). They assume that their platform sets the standard in user interface design. Bah humbug I say! The Mac is extremely confusing until you get used to it - innovations like using context menus but only having one mouse button, forcing you to use the keyboard to "right click" is mad. In the finder, pressing enter renames a files instead of opening it! The pretty Dock zooming is usually switched off after a few minutes because it makes it too easy to miss the icon you wanted.
Interestingly, Hyatt goes on to plug Chimera, his OS X front end to Gecko. It looks nice, but immediately seems to me to have even worse usability problems than the current Mozilla. He describes it as "a simple elegant user experience", which would sort of imply he'd built it with mpt's usability tips in mind. In fact, it:
Still has the address bar welded to the toolbar
Has exactly the same toolbar layout as Mozilla except with a Home button
Has a sidebar that uses a combo box to switch, therefore requiring two clicks instead of one to access different tabs
Has tabs labeled B, H and S - god knows what they stand for.
Don't get me wrong, I know Chimera isn't finished, and I deeply respect the work that Hyatt and MPT have done - but sometimes I can't help feeling that it's easy to make sweeping assertions about usability.
This sentiment is the exact reason why Linux isn't more widely used as a desktop operating system. Linux at present is a geek toy and a server OS. It will never be more until/unless Linux developers start re-evaluating the validity of the quoted statement above.
You're assuming that all linux users think that way. I don't. I see this all the time - some arrogant 733t kid pours scorn on "Windows lusers" and suddenly all Linux users/developers are being told that they will never "succeed" unless they change their attitudes!
Like any large community, Linux users have people with all types of different attitudes and opinions. Don't slap it down because somebody said something you don't agree with.
Re:In places where Internet is still expensive
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XP, Phone Home
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· Score: 2
Which brings me to my point. If Internet connections are configured in such a way (as often they are) that the connection happens transparently because the username and password are stored, then people are going to pay call charges to search their local disk. If they don't realise this (especially in the case of ISDN connections) then they may run up quite a bill when they do an extensive search every time they lose a file.
Yes, but ISDN isn't all that popular. Most people who have per-minute connections are modem users who definately WOULD notice if their machine was trying to connect in the background.
I don't like this Internet-integration with the desktop in the OS. Sure, if I want it to happen, I can download some software helper. No doubt by hacking the registry or something equally scary for any novice user, you may be able to switch this off. But it reeks of abuse of my phone line.
IMHO, internet integration is a good thing. I like the net integration with KDE for instance. However, the type of "internet integration" Microsoft practices is not normally to the benefit of the user. This doesn't invalidate the whole concept though.
It's time that the Internet was a separate part of the desktop. Plenty of people embrace the Internet, but many others will not, especially in countries where it is still expensive just to stay online an hour costs me $2. That's right, a crappy 33.6K connection costs me $2 due solely to phone connection charges.
Better get a flat rate connection then. Per-minute connections are good for low-level users, the type that check their email once every couple of days etc.
What happens to passport?
Microsoft was going to open up passport authentication to third-party ID servers via passport, right? Or am i just confused about that? Is that not happening anymore?
Is microsoft abandoning their drive to make Passport the authentication mechanism for *everything*, Starbucks and such, or are they just going to drop the pretense of making it an open system?
Short answer, Passport isn't going away any time soon. All their online services rely on it. However, they may be dropping their half-arsed attempts to merge it with Kerberos, a technology that was designed for closed environment LANs, not the internet.
The way i understood it, Hailstorm was a relatively decentralized technology as designed and didn't really DEPEND on microsoft being there to hold it all together. Right? Is it possible for people to take the hailstorm protocol, if they so desire, and set up an independent, decentralized hailstorm network that just happens to not be affiliated at all with microsoft?
No - Hailstorm is largely centralised. MS have always had plans to sell the software that makes it tick to other ID vendors later, but not any time soon, because they were betting on making a lot of money off of hosting the worlds identies. As it stands, Hailstorm is utterly centralised.
To be honest I can't decide whether I'm surprised or not at this. I'd always assumed that Hailstorm was their master plan, the only thing large enough to replace their previously enormous software profits. On the other hand, Hailstorm as it stood was always virtually unworkable.
Was GNOME MONO planning on implementing hailstorm as part of their.net workalike? Are they still going to?
No, they never had any plans to do make anything other than certain parts of the development platform.
Consider software. Open source is the ultimate in decentralized software. Could Open Source exist in anything approaching its current scope if there were no Internet?
Unfortunately most open source software these days appear to be centralised at SourceForge. That's a massive weak spot that I worry about sometimes.
Remember this - the Mozilla test builds are there to get bug feedback. So, what happens when Moz dies and talkback appears? Do you think simply clicking Send is enough? It's not. Here's what to do:
When a crash is reported by Talkback, see if you can reproduce it. If you can, don't bother sending the repeat crash logs, there's no point. Instead, try to make a minimal test case, so you find the exact problem that causes the crash.
Now go into Bugzilla and file a bug with a brief description of the crash, and most importantly of all the talkback ID of the crash. You can find this out by running the talkback program that's in the components directory. Once you've added the talkback ID to the crash report, a Mozilla engineer will pull the stack trace from the Talkback DB and work will start.
If you don't file in Bugzilla, chances are it won't be looked at! So file them!
Finally, a quick word of warning: don't be surprised if the bug is marked as critical/futured. I've found several times now when I've crashed Mozilla it's because I've been doing some strange stuff with XML or the site contains some seriously twisted markup. Although crashes are always treated seriously, if it's not a situation the average user will ever encounter it will probably get futured.
Yeah, I know about this one, in fact I was investigating it a few days ago. My big problem is that fonts often appear too small. This seems to be because Windows and Linux interpret font sizes slightly differently, and pages designed to look good on IE/Windows use smaller font sizes than look good on Linux.
I often find I have to ctrl-zoom the text a couple of times to make a web page readable. I'm not entirely sure how they intend to fix this, perhaps by bringing freetype in line with Windows rendering?
You have never mentioned OmniWeb. I'm convinced that this is the best web browser. Small... light... Integrates smoothly with desktop
There's a reason for this apathy. OmniWeb may be small and light, but it also has no DOM to speak of, is way behind on features compared to Mozilla and is also MacOS X only as far as I'm aware.
In fact I believe the Omni crew are switching away from their own rendering engine to using Gecko, because it'd take years for them to get to the level of rendering accuracy Mozilla has. OmniWeb is currently a little like Konqueror on Linux, real nice, but can't really compete yet in terms of rendering or features.
Now we'll see what people see as the real value of mp3s. Is it still a good idea to download it if the download is going to cost you 10c/meg? We'll find out shortly.
Basically I can tell you from living in the UK that the answer is basically... yes
First thing - most MP3/warez addicts are teenagers who cannot/will not buy their own stuff. These also tend to be the same people who have their connection paid for by somebody else.
Second thing - this age range is notorious (was notorious) for running up huge phone bills. In fact in 1999 the problem was so acute BT starting running television adverts highlighting the problem to try and sell unmetered. Thankfully now almost all ISPs offer unmetered, but many people still don't use it, typically those with low usage.
Final thing - at least in the UK I would absolutely support bandwidth caps on people. I have several friends with broadband connections and they use it for three things: the web, chat and downloads. Their parents pay the price of a broadband link, and all it ever gets used for is burning the transatlantic pipes so person X can listen to the latest songs, or play with the latest games. This really pisses me off, because as I intend to build my future career on selling software, I have an inbuilt hate of piracy.
Note: at my house, we use a 33.6k modem. This does not stop my brother downloading lots of MP3s and warezd VST plugins. Because we are unmetered and have a second phone line, it effectively doesn't matter how long he takes. In fact, my ISP automatically drops the line after 2 hours - to stop people hogging the resources.
Did people (especially kids) still download stuff when they were on metered connections? YES! And this is one of the main factors that drove adoption of unmetered access and broadband in the UK.
Just like the death of Napster spawned Gnutella, the death of the flat-rate Internet will spawn loosely confederated wireless networks.
You seemed to have missed the point that Napster was fast and efficient (in the technical sense, I hate music piracy) and Gnutella is by comparison extremely slow and unreliable. Decentralised internet connections? Doesn't sound too hot to me, and you still have to pay for the connection.
Within a year, the entire product line had Internet features. Now, 7 years later, people publicly lament that Microsoft has virtually taken the Internet over.
Yes - but this is what led to many of their security problems today. They decided they were going to "do" the internet, and so mashed a truckload of net features into all their products. So Word got the ability to detect hyperlinks, Outlook used IE to render web pages and so on.
The problem is - they didn't really do the net at all. Compared to say KDE, where I can give any KDE program a net URL to open and it'll just do it, the Windows internet integration is a joke. They never resolved key policy decisions, like which takes precedence: windows file metadata (with extensions) or MIME types? This is the problem that means I now get several emails every day that contain an embedded wave file, except it isn't a wave file, it's an EXE. IE sees that it's MIME-typed as a WAV, so passes it to the OS, which then makes its own, independant decision and detects from the extension that it's a program and so autoruns it.
The same problem surfaces with web pages. IE usually ignores MIME types - when I was developing a web application recently I wanted to see some XML embedded into an iframe, and then be able to copy and paste it. I return the XML as text/plain, but IE realises it's XML and shows it in that pretty tree thing. Now I can't copy and paste it. Mozilla however follows the rules, so I have to use that instead.
That's not a problem that can just be fixed overnight - it's a key design flaw. How do they fix that virus problem? By switching off the WAV background sound feature (something nobody ever used anyway) in emails. That's just a bandaid, and doesn't get to the core problem, which is the internet code in Windows usually ignores or doesn't receive MIME type info.
Now I have no doubt that after this session of looking at code, MS products will have caught up with the competition in terms of security. Nobody should underestimate them. But as has been pointed out, whether that'll change their long term mindset is anybodies guess.
Actually, if you read all the other posts that are discussing the difficulty of installing KDE 3.0, including the reviewers comments, and the only way to work around those problems, then you'll understand why Joe Public doesn't want to use Linux on his desktop. Sorry, but you'd never get a dependency error while trying to upgrade Windows, or Mac OS X for that matter.
Yeah, but that's usually because a major OS component upgrade is done for you by Apple/Microsoft as part of a major upgrade. I could go and download KDE 3 for SuSE right now, but I'm not going to for exactly that reason, I'd rather wait until SuSE 8.0 comes out, and then I'll upgrade all at once. I am 99% sure that I won't have any problems then, because the upgrade has been done by the people who built my system, not me. With MacOS/Windows though you don't get that choice.
What the open-source community has to realize (if they WANT Linux for everyone) is that Joe Public doesn't ever want to use the CLI. Ever. He wants to double click, wait a few minutes and start using his new enviroment.
And somebody upgrading to the next version of Mandrake/SuSE/whatever will probably use the graphical installer, which will fulfill this requirement.
Don't get me wrong, the whole RPM dependancy thing really sucks, in fact imho software management is THE weakest area of Linux. RPM is dominant but without strange hacks like urmpi can't even match Debian or Gentoo for one-command/one-click installations (you know what i mean). That's one of the things I hate most about SuSE: no smart package management.
Now this is what that review should have been like. Instead of lots of fluff about his specific problems, the review should have had what this post has - direct opinions, facts and advice in equal measure about actually USING the product, as opposed to simply installing it.
I suppose it just goes to show that reviewing something is actually a skill, not something that just anybody can do.
Thanks for a great mini review!
Re:This is the beginning of the revolution
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Google to Offer API
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· Score: 2
One way I'd consider of making money if I were google would be to merge the AdWord links with the top results so they are indistinguishable. If you have a paying account with them, you can opt to "clean up" the results.
Yeah, but the UK is way ahead of the US on this one. Ahead of most of the rest of the world in fact. The problem is, being the first in the world, we got to develop most of the technology. This means, it's not as good as other countries will be, kinda like the US with colour TV: the UK implemented it afterwards and had higher quality analogue TV as a result.
What really rankles is US protectionism though. For instance, their digital terrestrial trials were rigged to come out in favour of VS8 (I think that was the name) over COFDM which is what the UK and most of Europe use (they are both ways of encoding digital data on radio waves). They repeated the trials in face of massive international criticism and found that COFDM was superior, but decided to go with VS8 anyway because the American electronics manufacturers wanted protection from European companies that already had established bases in the technology.
The UK basically kicks the ass of every other country in the world when it comes to digital TV, with 3 different platforms all highly technically capable. The recent ruckus over ITV Digital doesn't change that - by all rights the US should be at an equal level with us or further ahead, but they are still bitchfighting over what standards to use.
I can't think of anything you can do in linux but can't do in OSX, and MANY things you cannot.
Use Linux?
Look, you may think OS X is the perfect OS and given a free copy the whole world would instantly convert, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to break it to you - that wouldn't happen. There'd be people who would tell you to get lost
I'd do it for personal beliefs (more below). Others don't like Aqua, don't like the Apple way. Whatever.
I, personally, believe the OS should be open. The OS together with the hardware are absolutely key to computing. Everything else revolves around them, which is why I believe they should be open. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no zealot, I don't give a monkeys ass about the applications on top. That can be as closed or as open as you like, suits me fine either way. I don't mind paying for software. But if one organisation controls the OS then you're heading for trouble, I mean look at Microsoft. I don't believe Apple would be any different in their shoes. And worse, Apple control the hardware too!
Once again, don't get me wrong. Apple produce lovely hardware, and lovely software. I'm willing to pay for those things, but only if I know they are open. Macs aren't standard hardware, though they are getting that way, they basically are made up of components that are standardised throughout the world. And OS X is like the Mac itself, sorta open.
But for me, sorta open isn't good enough. I think the OS should be like the web - governed but not chained to a neutral independant standards organisation like the W3C. Nothing like that exists.... yet
This market simply doesn't and shouldn't care all that much about what OS the PDA is running. Its a big geek factor to run Linux, but was it really a good choice? Probably not.
Depends on your point of view. From the customers point of view, it might not be. After all, they'll either like it or they won't, and they have a choice to whether to use it or not, same as with any OS (except windows on the desktop). However, look at the competition: Windows Pocket PC and PalmOS.
Now the Palm is a mighty fine OS, but it seems to be losing all but the budget market to Microsoft. Palm itself meanwhile is looking shaky, the handspring PDAs didn't take off, and the Palm models are looking increasingly dated and limited.
This could leave the PDA market in the unenviable position of also being dominated by Microsoft, simply through Pocket PC being better. Now whatever you may think of Sharp, and they do seem to have made some dumb mistakes here, they probably don't want to see MS dominate yet another marketplace as it tends to be bad for everybodies profit margins (other than Microsofts of course).
So - they are taking a risk by using Embedix/Qt rather than Pocket PC. As a result, there will be a segment of the populace (reviewers will always be amongst them) who will look down on this decision. After all, where operating systems are concerned not going with the mainstream usually brings the disadvantage of
a) being different and
b) not having as many apps.
However, Sharp is willing to take that risk because it knows that if one day PocketPC was the only viable OS for PDAs it'd be shafted, after all, whenever MS is in need of cash, well just turn the screws on the PDA makers. Why not?
Look - understand one thing: for a long time yet reviewers will always prefer PocketPC/PalmOS over Linux on PDAs for exactly the same reason they poopoohed Windows CE when it first came out: lack of apps, slow, unpolished, first generation etc, what's the advantage over Palm and so on.
Now Windows CE had the advantage when it came out of brand recognition: CEOs went, ooh, windows, we must have it, it's expensive but we'll have an integrated solution from one company. And MS refined the OS, the PocketPC of today is sooo much better than CE when it first came out. And there were no apps at first, but Windows developers found their skills were largely portable and so on.
But you are forgetting that Linux on the PDA is in the same position. It also has brand recognition, for different reasons. Instead of going, ooh, it'll integrate with everything, CEOs might well go, oooh, it'll be cheap, reliable and we'll be free from MS tyranny. They balance out. And right now it needs polish, it's a first generation product - what do you expect? And it doesn't have many apps yet, but they'll be quickly ported, if anything it's easier to port apps for this than for WinCE. Yes - there might be a problem with the apps available being of the geek variety, but I have plenty of non-geek apps available, and at the end of the day it'll be a market motivated by demand.
I'd be highly surprised if people who bought a Zaurus expected all their software to be free. Most won't care, and that means they'll be willing to pay for their software (which is good imho) and that means it won't be long until people figure out they can make a bit on the site porting their Linux apps or writing new apps for Embedix/Qt and selling them. I know I'd be thinking about it if I could afford a Zaurus;) I don't see any intrinsic reason why Linux PDAs should fail.... they can easily compete with PocketPC, the only problem right now is that PocketPC has a head start. But then that was true of Palm wasn't it?
So you're saying that it is effectively now a market in which there can be no new players. I think that's false.
If everyone took that logic, Linux wouldn't exist. Everyone would have said, "oh look, another OS, who needs one we already have Windows and the Mac, no apps either, pft". And many did - but it's growing anyway thanks to the people who weren't happy with the current offerings, and made their own.
Anyway, lots of people are programming apps for it already, mainly because it's trivial to port apps from Linux. In fact, I'd guess that's one (the main?) reason why they used it - easy access to a large base of software. The asteroids game on it for instance is just KAsteroids.
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No! The people who invented P2P apps maybe are pushing the envelope of what the net can do - but 95% of the people on the biggest P2P networks are just downloading free music. They're not pushing anything other than their luck, because they're basically massively abusing the system.
I'd love to be in NZ right now! Now all the kiddies that think downloading music and burning it to CDs for their friends constitutes a "business" - like some people I know - have had their access blocked, it means better connections for everyone else who does in fact respect the law. I think this should happen more.
I think you don't understand when vi is useful. I use it all the time for editing config files etc on the command line because it starts ... instantly. I hate it's wierd syntax etc and I'm getting to like Pico, but seriously, when you just want to make a quick mod to a text file, there's nothing better.
Oh - and as for "Visual Studio.NET bombs the linux developer back into the stone age", bah humbug I say! I moved to Linux because developing software is much easier with it, with Windows unless you fork out hundreds of dollars for a does-everything IDE it's a nightmare to write even the simplest of programs! VS.NET doesn't bomb nothing
However, their technology is deeply flawed, not just in an engineering sense but also a legal one: it is tied down by patents and IP disputes, and their system is essentially centralised.
They also have almost nobody on board at all, you can get an XNS "agent" but not use it anywhere. The technology is ludicrously complicated, hidden behind masses of white papers that don't really tell you what to do in order to make an implementation.
Anyway, I got involved through my earlier work with Genio, which was a complete open source system not just for personal data storage but also single-sign-on, a la Passport.
For instance, not having the Home link on the toolbar seems to be his pet hate, but many people have pointed out that it makes more sense for it to be put there, and Home isn't used all that often anyway. He says "menus are the most confusing UI element" and they should be limited to 2 levels deep at max, but millions of people every day use the Start Menu, which can easily go 5 or 6 levels deep. I never heard anyone complain about menus being too hard to use.
I often see this with Mac users (of which both mpt and hyatt are devotees). They assume that their platform sets the standard in user interface design. Bah humbug I say! The Mac is extremely confusing until you get used to it - innovations like using context menus but only having one mouse button, forcing you to use the keyboard to "right click" is mad. In the finder, pressing enter renames a files instead of opening it! The pretty Dock zooming is usually switched off after a few minutes because it makes it too easy to miss the icon you wanted.
Interestingly, Hyatt goes on to plug Chimera, his OS X front end to Gecko. It looks nice, but immediately seems to me to have even worse usability problems than the current Mozilla. He describes it as "a simple elegant user experience", which would sort of imply he'd built it with mpt's usability tips in mind. In fact, it:
Don't get me wrong, I know Chimera isn't finished, and I deeply respect the work that Hyatt and MPT have done - but sometimes I can't help feeling that it's easy to make sweeping assertions about usability.
You're assuming that all linux users think that way. I don't. I see this all the time - some arrogant 733t kid pours scorn on "Windows lusers" and suddenly all Linux users/developers are being told that they will never "succeed" unless they change their attitudes!
Like any large community, Linux users have people with all types of different attitudes and opinions. Don't slap it down because somebody said something you don't agree with.
Yes, but ISDN isn't all that popular. Most people who have per-minute connections are modem users who definately WOULD notice if their machine was trying to connect in the background.
I don't like this Internet-integration with the desktop in the OS. Sure, if I want it to happen, I can download some software helper. No doubt by hacking the registry or something equally scary for any novice user, you may be able to switch this off. But it reeks of abuse of my phone line.
IMHO, internet integration is a good thing. I like the net integration with KDE for instance. However, the type of "internet integration" Microsoft practices is not normally to the benefit of the user. This doesn't invalidate the whole concept though.
It's time that the Internet was a separate part of the desktop. Plenty of people embrace the Internet, but many others will not, especially in countries where it is still expensive just to stay online an hour costs me $2. That's right, a crappy 33.6K connection costs me $2 due solely to phone connection charges.
Better get a flat rate connection then. Per-minute connections are good for low-level users, the type that check their email once every couple of days etc.
Short answer, Passport isn't going away any time soon. All their online services rely on it. However, they may be dropping their half-arsed attempts to merge it with Kerberos, a technology that was designed for closed environment LANs, not the internet.
The way i understood it, Hailstorm was a relatively decentralized technology as designed and didn't really DEPEND on microsoft being there to hold it all together. Right? Is it possible for people to take the hailstorm protocol, if they so desire, and set up an independent, decentralized hailstorm network that just happens to not be affiliated at all with microsoft?
No - Hailstorm is largely centralised. MS have always had plans to sell the software that makes it tick to other ID vendors later, but not any time soon, because they were betting on making a lot of money off of hosting the worlds identies. As it stands, Hailstorm is utterly centralised.
To be honest I can't decide whether I'm surprised or not at this. I'd always assumed that Hailstorm was their master plan, the only thing large enough to replace their previously enormous software profits. On the other hand, Hailstorm as it stood was always virtually unworkable.
Was GNOME MONO planning on implementing hailstorm as part of their .net workalike? Are they still going to?
No, they never had any plans to do make anything other than certain parts of the development platform.
thanks -mike
Unfortunately most open source software these days appear to be centralised at SourceForge. That's a massive weak spot that I worry about sometimes.
I believe the BiDi code was contributed by IBM, though I'm not sure if they still maintain it.
When a crash is reported by Talkback, see if you can reproduce it. If you can, don't bother sending the repeat crash logs, there's no point. Instead, try to make a minimal test case, so you find the exact problem that causes the crash.
Now go into Bugzilla and file a bug with a brief description of the crash, and most importantly of all the talkback ID of the crash. You can find this out by running the talkback program that's in the components directory. Once you've added the talkback ID to the crash report, a Mozilla engineer will pull the stack trace from the Talkback DB and work will start.
If you don't file in Bugzilla, chances are it won't be looked at! So file them!
Finally, a quick word of warning: don't be surprised if the bug is marked as critical/futured. I've found several times now when I've crashed Mozilla it's because I've been doing some strange stuff with XML or the site contains some seriously twisted markup. Although crashes are always treated seriously, if it's not a situation the average user will ever encounter it will probably get futured.
Happy hacking!
I often find I have to ctrl-zoom the text a couple of times to make a web page readable. I'm not entirely sure how they intend to fix this, perhaps by bringing freetype in line with Windows rendering?
There's a reason for this apathy. OmniWeb may be small and light, but it also has no DOM to speak of, is way behind on features compared to Mozilla and is also MacOS X only as far as I'm aware.
In fact I believe the Omni crew are switching away from their own rendering engine to using Gecko, because it'd take years for them to get to the level of rendering accuracy Mozilla has. OmniWeb is currently a little like Konqueror on Linux, real nice, but can't really compete yet in terms of rendering or features.
Basically I can tell you from living in the UK that the answer is basically ... yes
First thing - most MP3/warez addicts are teenagers who cannot/will not buy their own stuff. These also tend to be the same people who have their connection paid for by somebody else.
Second thing - this age range is notorious (was notorious) for running up huge phone bills. In fact in 1999 the problem was so acute BT starting running television adverts highlighting the problem to try and sell unmetered. Thankfully now almost all ISPs offer unmetered, but many people still don't use it, typically those with low usage.
Final thing - at least in the UK I would absolutely support bandwidth caps on people. I have several friends with broadband connections and they use it for three things: the web, chat and downloads. Their parents pay the price of a broadband link, and all it ever gets used for is burning the transatlantic pipes so person X can listen to the latest songs, or play with the latest games. This really pisses me off, because as I intend to build my future career on selling software, I have an inbuilt hate of piracy.
Note: at my house, we use a 33.6k modem. This does not stop my brother downloading lots of MP3s and warezd VST plugins. Because we are unmetered and have a second phone line, it effectively doesn't matter how long he takes. In fact, my ISP automatically drops the line after 2 hours - to stop people hogging the resources.
Did people (especially kids) still download stuff when they were on metered connections? YES! And this is one of the main factors that drove adoption of unmetered access and broadband in the UK.
You seemed to have missed the point that Napster was fast and efficient (in the technical sense, I hate music piracy) and Gnutella is by comparison extremely slow and unreliable. Decentralised internet connections? Doesn't sound too hot to me, and you still have to pay for the connection.
Yes - but this is what led to many of their security problems today. They decided they were going to "do" the internet, and so mashed a truckload of net features into all their products. So Word got the ability to detect hyperlinks, Outlook used IE to render web pages and so on.
The problem is - they didn't really do the net at all. Compared to say KDE, where I can give any KDE program a net URL to open and it'll just do it, the Windows internet integration is a joke. They never resolved key policy decisions, like which takes precedence: windows file metadata (with extensions) or MIME types? This is the problem that means I now get several emails every day that contain an embedded wave file, except it isn't a wave file, it's an EXE. IE sees that it's MIME-typed as a WAV, so passes it to the OS, which then makes its own, independant decision and detects from the extension that it's a program and so autoruns it.
The same problem surfaces with web pages. IE usually ignores MIME types - when I was developing a web application recently I wanted to see some XML embedded into an iframe, and then be able to copy and paste it. I return the XML as text/plain, but IE realises it's XML and shows it in that pretty tree thing. Now I can't copy and paste it. Mozilla however follows the rules, so I have to use that instead.
That's not a problem that can just be fixed overnight - it's a key design flaw. How do they fix that virus problem? By switching off the WAV background sound feature (something nobody ever used anyway) in emails. That's just a bandaid, and doesn't get to the core problem, which is the internet code in Windows usually ignores or doesn't receive MIME type info.
Now I have no doubt that after this session of looking at code, MS products will have caught up with the competition in terms of security. Nobody should underestimate them. But as has been pointed out, whether that'll change their long term mindset is anybodies guess.
Are you saying that the future direction of our society isn't stuff that matters?
Yeah, but that's usually because a major OS component upgrade is done for you by Apple/Microsoft as part of a major upgrade. I could go and download KDE 3 for SuSE right now, but I'm not going to for exactly that reason, I'd rather wait until SuSE 8.0 comes out, and then I'll upgrade all at once. I am 99% sure that I won't have any problems then, because the upgrade has been done by the people who built my system, not me. With MacOS/Windows though you don't get that choice.
What the open-source community has to realize (if they WANT Linux for everyone) is that Joe Public doesn't ever want to use the CLI. Ever. He wants to double click, wait a few minutes and start using his new enviroment.
And somebody upgrading to the next version of Mandrake/SuSE/whatever will probably use the graphical installer, which will fulfill this requirement.
Don't get me wrong, the whole RPM dependancy thing really sucks, in fact imho software management is THE weakest area of Linux. RPM is dominant but without strange hacks like urmpi can't even match Debian or Gentoo for one-command/one-click installations (you know what i mean). That's one of the things I hate most about SuSE: no smart package management.
I suppose it just goes to show that reviewing something is actually a skill, not something that just anybody can do.
Thanks for a great mini review!
One way I'd consider of making money if I were google would be to merge the AdWord links with the top results so they are indistinguishable. If you have a paying account with them, you can opt to "clean up" the results.
What really rankles is US protectionism though. For instance, their digital terrestrial trials were rigged to come out in favour of VS8 (I think that was the name) over COFDM which is what the UK and most of Europe use (they are both ways of encoding digital data on radio waves). They repeated the trials in face of massive international criticism and found that COFDM was superior, but decided to go with VS8 anyway because the American electronics manufacturers wanted protection from European companies that already had established bases in the technology.
The UK basically kicks the ass of every other country in the world when it comes to digital TV, with 3 different platforms all highly technically capable. The recent ruckus over ITV Digital doesn't change that - by all rights the US should be at an equal level with us or further ahead, but they are still bitchfighting over what standards to use.
Use Linux?
Look, you may think OS X is the perfect OS and given a free copy the whole world would instantly convert, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to break it to you - that wouldn't happen. There'd be people who would tell you to get lost
I'd do it for personal beliefs (more below). Others don't like Aqua, don't like the Apple way. Whatever.
I, personally, believe the OS should be open. The OS together with the hardware are absolutely key to computing. Everything else revolves around them, which is why I believe they should be open. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no zealot, I don't give a monkeys ass about the applications on top. That can be as closed or as open as you like, suits me fine either way. I don't mind paying for software. But if one organisation controls the OS then you're heading for trouble, I mean look at Microsoft. I don't believe Apple would be any different in their shoes. And worse, Apple control the hardware too!
Once again, don't get me wrong. Apple produce lovely hardware, and lovely software. I'm willing to pay for those things, but only if I know they are open. Macs aren't standard hardware, though they are getting that way, they basically are made up of components that are standardised throughout the world. And OS X is like the Mac itself, sorta open.
But for me, sorta open isn't good enough. I think the OS should be like the web - governed but not chained to a neutral independant standards organisation like the W3C. Nothing like that exists .... yet
How about .... people who don't like OS X but have a Mac? They do exist you know
Depends on your point of view. From the customers point of view, it might not be. After all, they'll either like it or they won't, and they have a choice to whether to use it or not, same as with any OS (except windows on the desktop). However, look at the competition: Windows Pocket PC and PalmOS.
Now the Palm is a mighty fine OS, but it seems to be losing all but the budget market to Microsoft. Palm itself meanwhile is looking shaky, the handspring PDAs didn't take off, and the Palm models are looking increasingly dated and limited.
This could leave the PDA market in the unenviable position of also being dominated by Microsoft, simply through Pocket PC being better. Now whatever you may think of Sharp, and they do seem to have made some dumb mistakes here, they probably don't want to see MS dominate yet another marketplace as it tends to be bad for everybodies profit margins (other than Microsofts of course).
So - they are taking a risk by using Embedix/Qt rather than Pocket PC. As a result, there will be a segment of the populace (reviewers will always be amongst them) who will look down on this decision. After all, where operating systems are concerned not going with the mainstream usually brings the disadvantage of
a) being different and
b) not having as many apps.
However, Sharp is willing to take that risk because it knows that if one day PocketPC was the only viable OS for PDAs it'd be shafted, after all, whenever MS is in need of cash, well just turn the screws on the PDA makers. Why not?
Look - understand one thing: for a long time yet reviewers will always prefer PocketPC/PalmOS over Linux on PDAs for exactly the same reason they poopoohed Windows CE when it first came out: lack of apps, slow, unpolished, first generation etc, what's the advantage over Palm and so on.
Now Windows CE had the advantage when it came out of brand recognition: CEOs went, ooh, windows, we must have it, it's expensive but we'll have an integrated solution from one company. And MS refined the OS, the PocketPC of today is sooo much better than CE when it first came out. And there were no apps at first, but Windows developers found their skills were largely portable and so on.
But you are forgetting that Linux on the PDA is in the same position. It also has brand recognition, for different reasons. Instead of going, ooh, it'll integrate with everything, CEOs might well go, oooh, it'll be cheap, reliable and we'll be free from MS tyranny. They balance out. And right now it needs polish, it's a first generation product - what do you expect? And it doesn't have many apps yet, but they'll be quickly ported, if anything it's easier to port apps for this than for WinCE. Yes - there might be a problem with the apps available being of the geek variety, but I have plenty of non-geek apps available, and at the end of the day it'll be a market motivated by demand.
I'd be highly surprised if people who bought a Zaurus expected all their software to be free. Most won't care, and that means they'll be willing to pay for their software (which is good imho) and that means it won't be long until people figure out they can make a bit on the site porting their Linux apps or writing new apps for Embedix/Qt and selling them. I know I'd be thinking about it if I could afford a Zaurus ;) I don't see any intrinsic reason why Linux PDAs should fail.... they can easily compete with PocketPC, the only problem right now is that PocketPC has a head start. But then that was true of Palm wasn't it?
If everyone took that logic, Linux wouldn't exist. Everyone would have said, "oh look, another OS, who needs one we already have Windows and the Mac, no apps either, pft". And many did - but it's growing anyway thanks to the people who weren't happy with the current offerings, and made their own.
Anyway, lots of people are programming apps for it already, mainly because it's trivial to port apps from Linux. In fact, I'd guess that's one (the main?) reason why they used it - easy access to a large base of software. The asteroids game on it for instance is just KAsteroids.