...who'd never heard of this IDE before, and always want screenshots to quickly judge for themselves if something is worth a further look: screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3. (They're kinda old, so undoubtedly this thing has evolved quite a bit further since then.)
From the SVG project page: "Last modified: Tue Mar 4 07:27:13 GMT 2003"
I mean, yes, SVG is terribly exciting and all, but Mozilla has had these SVG builds for a loooong time now (and development, while continuing, isn't exactly very swift, so don't expect to see this in regular builds anywhere in the near future).
The only real "news" here is that it's now mentioned on freshmeat.
Still, publicity good I think. If anyone wants to give Mozilla a hand with making this better...
Re:Not for the more experienced reader
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 1
The main one of these is that Martin writes purely for effect. When the shock-effect of something happened is largest, that is when you know beyond a doubt that it will happen.
That sentence doesn't actually make sense, but I'll take a stab at it and presume you meant "stuff always happens when the shock-effect (of that stuff) will be felt the most by the reader."
Well... I mean... of course the author is going to try to write stuff that has a strong emotional effect on the reader.
s/happened/happening/ in the original sentence.
There's a difference between writing things that have a strong emotional effect, and writing things because of them having such an effect.
Robin Hobb's books for example usually have a major impact on readers. Yet this happens almost involuntarily, Robin does not go out of her way to heighten the effect or write things in a special way (I asked her about this not too long ago). Martin on the other hand is more like a stage magician, using smoke and mirrors - and then crudely and with the maximum amount of graphic violence slaughtering yet another character.
I'd certainly like to hear just one example where you think a character behaves stupidly for no reason other than to provide a "shock effect".
ugh, it's been quite a while (three year now since ASoS I think?)
The main ones I recall are major spoilers, and not direct stupidities, but one level of indirection removed so harder to argue. (That TRW happened as it did was inevitable; that youknowwho went there in the first place was the stupidity.)
Want to back up your comment by naming a few specific authors and/or a few specific works of said authors?
Ansen Dibell's Pursuit of the Screamer, early McKillip's, Martin himself in Windhaven, Tanith Lee to a certain effect, Zelazny in some of his short stories, Donaldson in both Mordant's Need and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Friedman's In Conquest Born.
These names are mostly what I recall from responses to specific points made in earlier discussions (I've been involved in quite a few; no desire to brave usenet; I've had my fill of disgruntled ex-jordan fans ("Martin will never make us wait as long on a new book as Jordan") at that westeros ezboard (*shudders*) a few years ago), where the type of "newbie" fan I referenced claimed that specific things that Martin did were so amazing and had never before been done. And no, I do not recall in response to which ideas. Mostly deaths and misery and other non-fluffy type of events.
every single other character in the series (no matter how unimportant) will be mean, vicious, cruel bastards - often literally.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Note that I'm not talking about kings and lords here - it's the little people, from Ser Meryn of the Kingsguard to the unnamed stable boy which Arya had to kill to escape. Martin's world is suffused with such squalor and misery - and every single one of his characters seems to embody this. (At least in AGoT and most of ACoK; ASoS is better.)
If you want a darker, gritter world than most modern fantasy offers, instead of Martin I recommend Steven Erikson's Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
I'll look it up.
Do that.
I have to qualify the recommendation though; the first book (Fardens of the Moon) will not impress you. (At least I wasn't impressed by it.) - It's decent, but that's about it. It's the second one (Deadhouse Gates) and the ones following that which will show you both why he is so often compared to Martin, and why he is always recommended above Martin.
I have absolutely no idea where you got this from (do you have a source?)
His own words at the Fantasy Fair in the Netherlands in April 2002. No direct quotes unfortunately, though they are undoubtedly out there somewhere. I've also seen at least one interview mentioning it.
I wasn't talking about good versus evil. I was talking about selfish versus selfless. About people being capable of simply acting decent and "neighbourly" to those they have no direct relation to. About being capable of expecting help from strangers if you're in need, rather than being robbed by them.
Sure there are people out there in the real world who won't give such help - but an entire world populated solely with people like this?
I don't think GRRM has ever written a stnad alone book. He almost always writes 6+ book series.
Uhm... name one other such series Martin has written?
Right... there are none. (Okay, stretching things really far you could call the Wild Cards Anthologies a 6+ book series, but c'mon...)
On the other hand, at the stand-alone novel front, there's Dying of the Light, Windhaven, Fevre Dream, The Armageddon Rag and Tuf Voyaging, plus of course dozens upon dozens upon dozens of short stories.
Actually, Martin has been saying that it is a 6 book series from the very beginning.
No, he has not. Originally it was intended to be a trilogy. Then it became four books. Then six. Right now everyone expects seven books (because AFFC replaced the five year gap that he was intending). Only Martin himself still says six books, but if you meet him in person and see him saying it, you can see that there's no conviction behind it anymore; he's already resigned to the fact that it will be seven books (and indeed already has a title for the 7th book).
Not for the more experienced reader
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Although Martin writes very decently, and I love the history of his world, A Song of Ice and Fire does have a few major flaws.
The main one of these is that Martin writes purely for effect. When the shock-effect of something happened is largest, that is when you know beyond a doubt that it will happen. No matter how stupid his characters will have to act because of it. For people who haven't read all that much fantasy (yes, generalizing, I know there are exceptions), a lot of this comes as complete surprises, and he seems to do a lot of things that are completely innovative; but people who've read fantasy beyond Tolkien/Eddings/Jordan/Goodkind(*shudders*)/Weis, etc and have instead explored fantasy from the late 70s and early 80s will recognize a lot of what's happening - and see that it's not all that special.
Second is the gritty-ness of his world. It's overdone. There is exactly one family in the entire world with people capable of having selfless thoughts; every single other character in the series (no matter how unimportant) will be mean, vicious, cruel bastards - often literally. If you want a darker, gritter world than most modern fantasy offers, instead of Martin I recommend Steven Erikson's Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Third is the fact that ASoIaF didn't start as a fantasy. This is not a secret, Martin often explains it, but many people don't realize it when they start reading the books. The series started as historical fiction. Only when the first book was almost finished did Martin begin to use more and more fantastical elements, and turn it into a fantasy.
"A Feast for Crows" is expected to be released in August.
No, that is the amazon date. The one thing every science fiction and fantasy reader should know is do not trust the amazon dates. (Which is a specification of the age-old "do not trust the bookstore people", which lives right along with, "don't bother the nice lady at Tor")
George R.R. Martin himself says, "STILL SORRY. STILL NOT DONE YET." - even if he were to finish right this instant, you couldn't expect the book before September. December 2003 or January 2004 would be a more reasonable guess at this point, though I won't be surprised at all is several more months will be added to that.
One thing Ive often wondered about regarding the development of HTML was : Why did nobody, not MS, not netscape... nobody ever implement a time tag extension.
It's been proposed at least several times at the w3c mailinglists, last that I know of just one month ago, here.
The problem, however, is that no one has turned the general ideas into a formal proposal for the working group, and the general attitude seems to be similar to the following quote:
- Those who need to use it won't;
- Those who don't need to use it (because they already use unambiguous date formats) will.
Re:NIghtly build is 1.5a
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I installed a nightly build two days ago and it is named 1.5a, not 1.4 somethng.
Anyone know why?
Because the 1.4 development has been split off on a branch, and meanwhile on the trunk development has already started for 1.5 alpha. (See the image in the roadmap for a visualization.) Although it won't be 1.5a for quite a while, it already has the version number for it.
If potentially getting absolutely buggy and alpha builds doesn't appeal to you, you won't want to download builds from latest/ - you'll want to download from latest-1.4/
Re:THAT'S considered an acceptible release bug???
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 1
Mac OS and Windows: Using ATI video drivers will lead to random crashes on many sites.
How the heck are RANDOM CRASHES an acceptable release time bug? Especialy with the many MANY users out there who have integrated ATI chips?
ah yes, and here is another good one. . .
Double right clicking on a page can disable the keyboard.
Err, I am NOT using 1.4 RC1 any time soon, I have OCD and I compulsivly click on white space on a website while reading it. (no, seriously. . ..)
Uhm, yeah... If you'll look at the bug numbers for these bugs (101055 and 70812), you'll see that they're somewhat low (current bugnumbers are 207k+), and indeed, opening the bugs reveals that they've been reported back in 2001. Every Mozilla release to date has probably 'suffered' from these problems (they're mentioned in the release ntoes for 1.0 as well). Nice to go on a ruckus about them right now, but they haven't exactly bothered many people before... (Mozilla is accepting patches, btw.)
That is not to say that these aren't bugs that should be fixed, and their severity is acknowledged by the simple fact of having them mentioned in the release notes (it'd suck to suffer from them I guess), but it's not something worth holding any release over...
Calling the next Mozilla release 2.0 will not be justified. Although Mozilla Firebird will have a completely new ui, Mozilla does not consider such things important for releases. After all, it's not an end-user product.
If you remember the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, you'll see that one of the most important point of that release is:
A set of promises to keep compatibility with various APIs, broadly construed (XUL 1.0 is an API), until a 2.0 or higher-numbered major release. All milestone releases and trunk development between 1.0 and 2.0 will preserve frozen interface compatibility. Mozilla 1.0 is a greenlight to hackers, corporations, and book authors to get busy building atop this stable base set of APIs.
So unless and until we go break the APIs, or do other major work at that level of the program, there is not yet a reason to call it Mozilla 2.0. Because once again, it's not the occasional end-users which are Mozilla's customers, it's the people embedding Mozilla in various products, the people distributing releases based on Mozilla. And those don't care about some silly little front-end changes.
I got the first unrequested popup I've ever run across in Mozilla when I was reading a NYTimes article
This is one of 'many' known workaround for the default Mozilla popup blocker. Search bugzilla for "NY Times" if you want the exact details, but the fix is as easy as adding the following pref to your user.js file (in your profile directory, create if necessary)
user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000);
Basically this will only allow windows to open immediately following a click.
Of course the real fix will be to move to a whitelist of actions that allow windows to open (yes, there's a bug open for this as well).
I doubt Asa would have said something like that, but 7.5 is common speculation yeah. The improvements since the 1.0.x branch are definitely big enough to warrant such a jump in version number.
As far as I'm concerned, they'd even warrant a jump to 8.0 (although I doubt that will happen), for if you put the list of "what's new" in the release notes for 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 'soon' 1.4 next to each other, you have an awful lot of new features and speed-improvements
For some reason about:kitchensink doesn't work for me in Mozilla 1.3. Hopefully it works in this version.
As has only been mentioned every single time the thing was mentioned since the original report, about:kitchensink has never worked in Mozilla. The original report about it was posted to slashdot when the bug got r= and sr=, but at that point it still needed a= to get into the (then frozen) tree, and that was denied, because projects like Phoenix and Camino and Beonex and everything else building on Mozilla would have inherited the easteregg, while for them it definitely didn't apply.
So don't expect to see this working anytime soon, though the actual xhtml file that would have showed on about:kitchensink is of course still visible and makes for a very nice technology-demo.
The spam filtering is a little too aggressive. Seems to mark everybody that isn't in my address book as junk.
So mark all that email as non-junk again to correct the behaviour. The filters will learn very quickly if you do.
The bayesian filters working correctly depends on having knowledge of both email that is considered junk and email that isn't junk.
Is there a way to re-train the filters?
If you really have to, you can delete training.dat to remove all training information (found in your profile, see the release notes for the location if you don't know).
How often am I supposed to be creating a new profile? Every release? Every major release (i.e. non alpha or beta)?
Never. I've been running with the same profile since 0.9.2, updating to a new nightly two or three times a week (though also a few times not for a month or two, so that's not the trick), and the worst I've ever had to do to my profile is getting rid off my xul.mfl or localstore.rdf files (which are a sort of caches and will be recreated automatically when you next start mozilla). As long as you install mozilla in a new directory each time (or completely remove the contents of the old directory first), you shouldn't run into any trouble when upgrading.
The idea of a ringworld is not unique, and I doubt it was be "ripped off" from Niven. It's merely a logical reduced version of a Dyson sphere.
(Although I have to note I don't know the Halo story, so perhaps if it has more similarities...)
But seeing as how it apparently circles a "gas planet" rather than a star... it's more similar to Arthur C. Clarke building upon the possibilities of space-elevators. I believe that as early as in The Fountains of Paradise (definitely not sure about this one) the idea was already to connect several of these space elevators in space, thus creating one huge band around the entire planet. (And if it wasn't in Fountains of Paradise, then at the very least there have been dozens of books since in which this idea was used.)
Why risk human lives and billions of dollars on lower orbit?
Because humans are not coldly analytical beings. We need to keep dreaming. We need to have projects that capture our interest and imagination, projects that make us want to give everything we have, to strive just that tad harder.
Not because this in itself is a goal, but because it is an essential ingredient for a future with a world we might actually someday be proud of.
I'm currently happily perusing all the other suggestions made so far for specific websites, but in my experience a big problem of websites like these is that they can be either very broad but pretty shallow, or limited in scope but very thorough. Given these two options, I definitely prefer the second kind. So you need to find the websites dedicated to specific genres. For finding these websites I'd suggest looking around on usenet groups for whatever genre you prefer.
Personally I'm an ectophile, meaning I like ectophilic music.:) This is mostly female singer-songwriters, from pretty well known artists like Enya and Loreena McKennitt, all the way to the fabulous, and if you ever come across someone who's heard of them you shouldn't bother playing any lotteries ever again, Basque and Happy Rhodes. The website dedicated to this particular kind of music is The Ectophiles' Guide to Good Music. Almost all the entries for different artists have links to other comparable artists, or you can simply follow the pretty specific subgenres.
I'd assume that there are similar websites for other genres, from barbiepop to hardrock, although not being overly interested in these other genres I wouldn't know where to find them. Still, merely being aware of the existence of this 'class' of website with extensive information within one subgenre like that, I think it should be possible to find them for other genres.
Well, what do you suggest I do when I want to access my bank account (www.netbank.com) and cannot because they have problems with Mozilla not always working right so just decided to disable it entirely?
If you look at the Tech Evangelism bug for this bank (bug 85005), you'll see that the reason the site doesn't work is due to some faulty browser-sniffing javascript, and an old version of hiermenus used for navigation.
Updating these menus to a new version that work with standards compliant browsers is on the todo list of the webmaster.
I personally come across maybe one site a month that blocks Mozilla, and believe you me, it's always very easy to find their competitor. (Though banks are really notoriously bad with blocking non-IE browsers.)
The bug you describe with Mozilla taking forever to restore after having been minimized for a long time is a long-standing very hard to track down bug. Knowing about it, I'd say simply close Mozilla rather than minimizing if you know you'll not be using it for a while.
Can someone fill me in what (if anything) makes Beonex a better choice?
Although like any other distribution based on Mozilla (like Netscape), Beonex is running behind in features on the regular Mozilla releases, it does actually have a few things that it does better than Mozilla.
If I'm not mistaken (*actually bothers to check the website -...I'm not) Beonex 0.8.1 is still based on Mozilla 1.0.1, so it's got all that stability, yet it does offer a few features from the trunk, such as the option to view HTML mail as plain text.
Another feature from Beonex which isn't found in Mozilla at all (yet?) are options to set the HTTP_REFERER; I think you can opt to never send it, to only send it within the same domain, to always fake it to somethign else (not sure about this one), or to just send it always.
Where Mozilla preferences are set in such a way that they don't provide optimal security and/or privacy, Beonex has changed those defaults so they do. (Improved privacy & security are the main focus of Beonex as I see it.)
Beonex also comes with a spell checker by default, something which the latest version of Mozilla is still lacking. (Yes, the Netscape 7 spellchecker is currently once more working on linux builds, but not on windows.)
Of course, now I'm comparing Beonex with Mozilla, while what I should do is compare Beonex with Netscape 7. There you trade in integrated AIM/ICQ for popup blocking (though that's finally coming in Netscape 7.01 - even with whitelisting options), image blocking, better default preferences, and general lack of AOL clutter.
Basically, Beonex would be the ideal distribution for any geek if it wasn't for Mozilla itself appealing more.
Slashdot Mirror
...who'd never heard of this IDE before, and always want screenshots to quickly judge for themselves if something is worth a further look:
screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3. (They're kinda old, so undoubtedly this thing has evolved quite a bit further since then.)
From the SVG project page: "Last modified: Tue Mar 4 07:27:13 GMT 2003"
I mean, yes, SVG is terribly exciting and all, but Mozilla has had these SVG builds for a loooong time now (and development, while continuing, isn't exactly very swift, so don't expect to see this in regular builds anywhere in the near future).
The only real "news" here is that it's now mentioned on freshmeat.
Still, publicity good I think. If anyone wants to give Mozilla a hand with making this better...
Robin Hobb's books for example usually have a major impact on readers. Yet this happens almost involuntarily, Robin does not go out of her way to heighten the effect or write things in a special way (I asked her about this not too long ago). Martin on the other hand is more like a stage magician, using smoke and mirrors - and then crudely and with the maximum amount of graphic violence slaughtering yet another character.
ugh, it's been quite a while (three year now since ASoS I think?) The main ones I recall are major spoilers, and not direct stupidities, but one level of indirection removed so harder to argue. (That TRW happened as it did was inevitable; that youknowwho went there in the first place was the stupidity.)
Ansen Dibell's Pursuit of the Screamer, early McKillip's, Martin himself in Windhaven, Tanith Lee to a certain effect, Zelazny in some of his short stories, Donaldson in both Mordant's Need and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Friedman's In Conquest Born.
These names are mostly what I recall from responses to specific points made in earlier discussions (I've been involved in quite a few; no desire to brave usenet; I've had my fill of disgruntled ex-jordan fans ("Martin will never make us wait as long on a new book as Jordan") at that westeros ezboard (*shudders*) a few years ago), where the type of "newbie" fan I referenced claimed that specific things that Martin did were so amazing and had never before been done. And no, I do not recall in response to which ideas. Mostly deaths and misery and other non-fluffy type of events.
Note that I'm not talking about kings and lords here - it's the little people, from Ser Meryn of the Kingsguard to the unnamed stable boy which Arya had to kill to escape. Martin's world is suffused with such squalor and misery - and every single one of his characters seems to embody this. (At least in AGoT and most of ACoK; ASoS is better.)
Do that.
I have to qualify the recommendation though; the first book (Fardens of the Moon) will not impress you. (At least I wasn't impressed by it.) - It's decent, but that's about it. It's the second one (Deadhouse Gates) and the ones following that which will show you both why he is so often compared to Martin, and why he is always recommended above Martin.
His own words at the Fantasy Fair in the Netherlands in April 2002. No direct quotes unfortunately, though they are undoubtedly out there somewhere. I've also seen at least one interview mentioning it.
I wasn't talking about good versus evil. I was talking about selfish versus selfless. About people being capable of simply acting decent and "neighbourly" to those they have no direct relation to. About being capable of expecting help from strangers if you're in need, rather than being robbed by them.
Sure there are people out there in the real world who won't give such help - but an entire world populated solely with people like this?
Right... there are none. (Okay, stretching things really far you could call the Wild Cards Anthologies a 6+ book series, but c'mon...)
On the other hand, at the stand-alone novel front, there's Dying of the Light, Windhaven, Fevre Dream, The Armageddon Rag and Tuf Voyaging, plus of course dozens upon dozens upon dozens of short stories.
Although Martin writes very decently, and I love the history of his world, A Song of Ice and Fire does have a few major flaws.
The main one of these is that Martin writes purely for effect. When the shock-effect of something happened is largest, that is when you know beyond a doubt that it will happen. No matter how stupid his characters will have to act because of it. For people who haven't read all that much fantasy (yes, generalizing, I know there are exceptions), a lot of this comes as complete surprises, and he seems to do a lot of things that are completely innovative; but people who've read fantasy beyond Tolkien/Eddings/Jordan/Goodkind(*shudders*)/Weis, etc and have instead explored fantasy from the late 70s and early 80s will recognize a lot of what's happening - and see that it's not all that special.
Second is the gritty-ness of his world. It's overdone. There is exactly one family in the entire world with people capable of having selfless thoughts; every single other character in the series (no matter how unimportant) will be mean, vicious, cruel bastards - often literally. If you want a darker, gritter world than most modern fantasy offers, instead of Martin I recommend Steven Erikson's Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Third is the fact that ASoIaF didn't start as a fantasy. This is not a secret, Martin often explains it, but many people don't realize it when they start reading the books. The series started as historical fiction. Only when the first book was almost finished did Martin begin to use more and more fantastical elements, and turn it into a fantasy.
George R.R. Martin himself says, "STILL SORRY. STILL NOT DONE YET." - even if he were to finish right this instant, you couldn't expect the book before September. December 2003 or January 2004 would be a more reasonable guess at this point, though I won't be surprised at all is several more months will be added to that.
It's been proposed at least several times at the w3c mailinglists, last that I know of just one month ago, here.
The problem, however, is that no one has turned the general ideas into a formal proposal for the working group, and the general attitude seems to be similar to the following quote:
If potentially getting absolutely buggy and alpha builds doesn't appeal to you, you won't want to download builds from latest/ - you'll want to download from latest-1.4/
That is not to say that these aren't bugs that should be fixed, and their severity is acknowledged by the simple fact of having them mentioned in the release notes (it'd suck to suffer from them I guess), but it's not something worth holding any release over...
Calling the next Mozilla release 2.0 will not be justified. Although Mozilla Firebird will have a completely new ui, Mozilla does not consider such things important for releases. After all, it's not an end-user product.
If you remember the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, you'll see that one of the most important point of that release is:
So unless and until we go break the APIs, or do other major work at that level of the program, there is not yet a reason to call it Mozilla 2.0. Because once again, it's not the occasional end-users which are Mozilla's customers, it's the people embedding Mozilla in various products, the people distributing releases based on Mozilla. And those don't care about some silly little front-end changes.
yeah, you forgot mentioning about:kitchensink for some free karma... ;)
I doubt Asa would have said something like that, but 7.5 is common speculation yeah. The improvements since the 1.0.x branch are definitely big enough to warrant such a jump in version number.
As far as I'm concerned, they'd even warrant a jump to 8.0 (although I doubt that will happen), for if you put the list of "what's new" in the release notes for 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 'soon' 1.4 next to each other, you have an awful lot of new features and speed-improvements
As has only been mentioned every single time the thing was mentioned since the original report, about:kitchensink has never worked in Mozilla. The original report about it was posted to slashdot when the bug got r= and sr=, but at that point it still needed a= to get into the (then frozen) tree, and that was denied, because projects like Phoenix and Camino and Beonex and everything else building on Mozilla would have inherited the easteregg, while for them it definitely didn't apply.
So don't expect to see this working anytime soon, though the actual xhtml file that would have showed on about:kitchensink is of course still visible and makes for a very nice technology-demo.
So mark all that email as non-junk again to correct the behaviour. The filters will learn very quickly if you do.
The bayesian filters working correctly depends on having knowledge of both email that is considered junk and email that isn't junk.
If you really have to, you can delete training.dat to remove all training information (found in your profile, see the release notes for the location if you don't know).
Because it reminds me of something familiar... Or should I say someone?
You'd have thunk that with the recent 'review' of Mandrake 9.1 more people would have picked up on the similarities...
The idea of a ringworld is not unique, and I doubt it was be "ripped off" from Niven. It's merely a logical reduced version of a Dyson sphere.
(Although I have to note I don't know the Halo story, so perhaps if it has more similarities...)
But seeing as how it apparently circles a "gas planet" rather than a star... it's more similar to Arthur C. Clarke building upon the possibilities of space-elevators. I believe that as early as in The Fountains of Paradise (definitely not sure about this one) the idea was already to connect several of these space elevators in space, thus creating one huge band around the entire planet. (And if it wasn't in Fountains of Paradise, then at the very least there have been dozens of books since in which this idea was used.)
Not because this in itself is a goal, but because it is an essential ingredient for a future with a world we might actually someday be proud of.
I'm currently happily perusing all the other suggestions made so far for specific websites, but in my experience a big problem of websites like these is that they can be either very broad but pretty shallow, or limited in scope but very thorough. Given these two options, I definitely prefer the second kind. So you need to find the websites dedicated to specific genres. For finding these websites I'd suggest looking around on usenet groups for whatever genre you prefer.
:) This is mostly female singer-songwriters, from pretty well known artists like Enya and Loreena McKennitt, all the way to the fabulous, and if you ever come across someone who's heard of them you shouldn't bother playing any lotteries ever again, Basque and Happy Rhodes.
Personally I'm an ectophile, meaning I like ectophilic music.
The website dedicated to this particular kind of music is The Ectophiles' Guide to Good Music. Almost all the entries for different artists have links to other comparable artists, or you can simply follow the pretty specific subgenres.
I'd assume that there are similar websites for other genres, from barbiepop to hardrock, although not being overly interested in these other genres I wouldn't know where to find them. Still, merely being aware of the existence of this 'class' of website with extensive information within one subgenre like that, I think it should be possible to find them for other genres.
If I'm not mistaken (*actually bothers to check the website -
Another feature from Beonex which isn't found in Mozilla at all (yet?) are options to set the HTTP_REFERER; I think you can opt to never send it, to only send it within the same domain, to always fake it to somethign else (not sure about this one), or to just send it always.
Where Mozilla preferences are set in such a way that they don't provide optimal security and/or privacy, Beonex has changed those defaults so they do. (Improved privacy & security are the main focus of Beonex as I see it.)
Beonex also comes with a spell checker by default, something which the latest version of Mozilla is still lacking. (Yes, the Netscape 7 spellchecker is currently once more working on linux builds, but not on windows.)
Of course, now I'm comparing Beonex with Mozilla, while what I should do is compare Beonex with Netscape 7. There you trade in integrated AIM/ICQ for popup blocking (though that's finally coming in Netscape 7.01 - even with whitelisting options), image blocking, better default preferences, and general lack of AOL clutter.
Basically, Beonex would be the ideal distribution for any geek if it wasn't for Mozilla itself appealing more.