How can this be any better then a paperless voting mashine that has gotten a lot of bad press in here lately? The fact that it is based on linux doesn't help one bit unless people can actually verify what code are running on the servers during the election. Blackbox voting is blackbox voting, no matter what anyone claims is in the box.
Also, FF is being developed by people who aren't getting paid (well, most aren't) for their service compared to Microsoft, a multi-billion dollar corporation which has had 10 years to try and get the bugs out of their product.
That does not matter in the least. As a user deciding which software to use I don't care how it was developed in the least. What I care about is what I get for my money. FOSS software has no more of an excuse for bugs and exploits then propriatry.
And I say that as one of the mentioned developers who have worked on mozilla for years, most of which unpaied.
That said, this advisory doesn't mean anything. Sure, it's bad that a website can crash your browser, but that has always been the case with any browser released. But it's not nearly as bad as exploits that allow sites to steal your data or hack into your system, which this so far does not claim to be.
And no matter what, what happened to responsible reporting? Releasing exploits in the wild without giving the developers a chance to develop a patch first is just plain stupid and shows a complete lack of professionalism.
I think this says a lot about the intelligence of the people creating todays DVDs.
Region codes was a bad idea to start off with. There are a lot of DVDs released that get region coding that will never ever be released for the remaining regions, thus cutting themselfs out of a huge market. All DVDs produced here in sweden inevitably get a region 2 coding, although they will never be released outside of europe. This means that I can never buy any of these DVDs for my friends in the US, even though they put english subtitles on them.
And honestly, in the cases where a DVD is released in the US first and then in europe, the majority of the EU market will wait for the EU release. First of all so that they can hold and feel the DVD in the store before buying it, second to get the proper subtitles and other EU specific content. Sales in stores is still vastly bigger then sales online, especially if you have to pay for delivery across an ocean and then deal with customs.
And it seems like the DVD producers have realized this since they are asking for regions to be removed for HDDVD. However, they are not smart enough to stop using region codes on normal DVDs! They still keep shooting themselfs in the foot just because they are given a gun.
The best way to deal with this is to call UPS (or DHL or whathaveyou) and ask if they want to sponsor a new set of furniture. Then put a big blurb at the top of the site about how FedEx sucks but that DHL was happy to sponsor the project.
I wouldn't be surpriced if UPS would even make commersials with this guy to show hwo good quality their packaging has.
This isn't about making a custom version of windows that is more optimized so that it can run on old hardware. What they are doing is running the slow applications remotly, probably using citrix like technology (MS has their own version but I can't remember the name).
So what this probably is is a version of windows that cuts out a few OS features that affects performance, and then preconfiguring it so that it will run a pile of applications from a central server.
Of course, this is something that's always been easy to do on unix. Linux sounds better and better with every announcement comming out of Redmond these days...
What amazes me the most is the amount of bugs a device with 1.7 billion transistors has compared to the number of bugs in, say, Windows XP, GIMP or Firefox.
And don't give me any crap about that software is somehow inherently harder to keep bugfree. I develop both and there really is little difference when it comes to complexity.
Sure, software performs more complex tasks, but when you add 'parallel-ness' of hardware, as well as timing issues, temperature and manufacturing issues, clock distribution, leakage and crosstalk, hardware defenetly is a pretty good match.
The simple truth is that there is simply vastly more testing that goes into hardware then most software (software in mars rovers and lunar landers would be an exception). And I bet that there are better design methods and safty guards too.
When will who learn? Microsoft? They already did. They learned that funding reasearch groups is a great way to portray themselfs as they see fit and at the say time spread FUD about linux and other competitors.
I don't see that big of a risk that projects fork. The only thing that would require forking is if some devs wanted to go with GPL 3 and some wanted to stick with GPL 2. However I don't think the differences between them will be big enough that anyone would go to such drastic measures as forking.
What I am worried about though is how will large projects like the linux kernel transition to the new version? You'd have to hunt down all developers and request permission from each and every one of them. This seems like a next to impossible task for a project that's comming up on its 14th year birthday.
This isn't a problem for projects that either put "or later" in the license, or that transfer the copyright of all contributions to a central body. But neither seem to be the case with the kernel, or did I miss something?
APB does (most likly) not own the copyright to these files, or have permission to distribute them. So therefor they couldn't possibly turn the files into public domain.
It does however make them copyright violators which would be an interesting twist if they got sued. However since only the copyright owners of these files can sue them I'd say that they're pretty safe.
Whoever said that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law clearly didn't know very much law...
This sounds great for developing countries on a tight budget. (Well, medicine seems to be on a tight budget all over the world these days).
Anyone wants to take bets on how long it'll take for some company to create a genetically engineered worm that is slightly more efficient and patents it? And then somehow forces this new worm onto doctors all over the world, for a handsome fee of course.
Amazingly, for such a popular method of 'communication' between and within applications, XML is admitted by most to be rather flawed and bulky...
Yep. That didn't stop Microsoft from adding even more weight to it by creating SOAP though. Now there's a bulky format. It's like shipping a shirt-button in container on an oiltanker.
While it's a good thing that the network protocols are being ordered open, I've never understood why this was chosen. Microsoft has a much stronger hold on the desktop then they do on the server because this is where their lock-in tactics have worked much better.
So why not order the office formats to be opened up instead? These formats is what is forcing people to stick with microsoft upgrade through upgrade. If OpenOffice could flawlessly open word and excel documents there is no doubt in my mind that a mixed microsoft/non-microsoft environment would work much better.
Anyone know why the network protocols were targeted? Or if there is any chance that the office formats will be forced open too?
I just wish they would wait until there are a few products out there using this before releasing a crack. That way they can't just continue the new-crack-new-format dance, but will actually have to live with a broken format. Maybe then they will try to rethink their strategy.
How can anyone be so stupid as to sign a 15 year deal in an industry as changing as end user software. And in games nontheless, and industry that is currently changing at an insane pase.
Here's my prediction. EA is going to continue releasing halfassed titles with the ESPN brand that are nothing more then minor incremental upgrades of previous releases. They're going to pull in some money to start with, but as people start to realize that there are other much better titles out there sales are going to drop.
Inevitibly they will drop so far that the many of the titles are going to be scrapped and fewer and fewer titles are going to be released with the ESPN brand bringing in less and less money for ESPN.
At this point we're probably somewhere 4-8 years down the road.
EA (or EA sports) will either manage to stay valuble on their other types of games, or they will start dropping on the stockmarket.
If they manage to stay valuble the ESPN brand will be sub-leased to other companies making the profit be split up between three companies, as well as making ESPN loose control of their own brand.
If they drop too far in value the exclusive right will eventually be picked up by some other major games company (Microsoft?) and things will restart with them.
I'm guessing we're now somewhere 8-13 years down the road.
What might possibly break this bad cycle is if the exclusive right deal drops so much in value that ESPN can buy it back and do something sensible with their brand in the games industry instead.
All in all this is a great shortterm deal for EA and I send my congratulations to their negotiators (who I'm sure is walking home with a big stack of greens). ESPN is the big looser here as they'll loose out on the getting-very-big computer games market. The general public will loose out on the ability to play great titles with their favourite teams, but they'll still be able to play great games.
Of course all of this is quite obvious. I just wanted to put it down in a slashdot post so that I 10 years from now can point back and say 'I told you so'.
"How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?"
Yeah, what mozilla needs is more people that work on the UI. That'll really help.
Seriously though, the problem with UI in most FOSS apps (and certainly in mozilla) is not a lack of people that know how to create patches for the UI. The lack is in people that know how to design good UI. Actually, i'd think this is true in comercial apps too.
In fact, one of the design-goals for the organisation behind FireFox, have fewer UI designers. This was because the old mozilla suit suffered from the classic too-many-chefs problem when it came to the UI.
The problem with UI is that it's very easy to have an oppinion about it, but it's much harder to do it right. While FireFox and many other applications are getting better, what the FOSS world desperatly needs is more professional UI designers and more professional level testing of UI. Computers are still desperatly hard to use, mostly because of bad UI.
I don't think this will have a big effect on the average passanger due to pricing. There is already WiFi on most airports which is just as usefull for people stuck in transfer for hours. However they charge out of the wazoo. Usually you pay something like $20 for a month, which is useless for someone that's just flying through once.
I suspect the exact same thing will happen with WiFi on airplanes. It will be horribly expensive and not worth to bother with unless you *have to* get online (maybe you forgot to turn of your TCP/IP conected stove or some such).
Slashdot Mirror
At my company we're heavily investing in our Internet department. In fact, it's so big that everyone at the company works there.
Oh, did I mention that I work at the Mozilla Corporation?
How can this be any better then a paperless voting mashine that has gotten a lot of bad press in here lately? The fact that it is based on linux doesn't help one bit unless people can actually verify what code are running on the servers during the election. Blackbox voting is blackbox voting, no matter what anyone claims is in the box.
Also, FF is being developed by people who aren't getting paid (well, most aren't) for their service compared to Microsoft, a multi-billion dollar corporation which has had 10 years to try and get the bugs out of their product.
That does not matter in the least. As a user deciding which software to use I don't care how it was developed in the least. What I care about is what I get for my money. FOSS software has no more of an excuse for bugs and exploits then propriatry.
And I say that as one of the mentioned developers who have worked on mozilla for years, most of which unpaied.
That said, this advisory doesn't mean anything. Sure, it's bad that a website can crash your browser, but that has always been the case with any browser released. But it's not nearly as bad as exploits that allow sites to steal your data or hack into your system, which this so far does not claim to be.
And no matter what, what happened to responsible reporting? Releasing exploits in the wild without giving the developers a chance to develop a patch first is just plain stupid and shows a complete lack of professionalism.
I think this says a lot about the intelligence of the people creating todays DVDs.
Region codes was a bad idea to start off with. There are a lot of DVDs released that get region coding that will never ever be released for the remaining regions, thus cutting themselfs out of a huge market. All DVDs produced here in sweden inevitably get a region 2 coding, although they will never be released outside of europe. This means that I can never buy any of these DVDs for my friends in the US, even though they put english subtitles on them.
And honestly, in the cases where a DVD is released in the US first and then in europe, the majority of the EU market will wait for the EU release. First of all so that they can hold and feel the DVD in the store before buying it, second to get the proper subtitles and other EU specific content. Sales in stores is still vastly bigger then sales online, especially if you have to pay for delivery across an ocean and then deal with customs.
And it seems like the DVD producers have realized this since they are asking for regions to be removed for HDDVD. However, they are not smart enough to stop using region codes on normal DVDs! They still keep shooting themselfs in the foot just because they are given a gun.
MORONS!
I wouldn't be surpriced if UPS would even make commersials with this guy to show hwo good quality their packaging has.
My spelling, though, is of pretty low quality. : )
The best way to deal with this is to call UPS (or DHL or whathaveyou) and ask if they want to sponsor a new set of furniture. Then put a big blurb at the top of the site about how FedEx sucks but that DHL was happy to sponsor the project.
I wouldn't be surpriced if UPS would even make commersials with this guy to show hwo good quality their packaging has.
Wow, I love symposia.
I know this is slashdot, but please RTFA.
This isn't about making a custom version of windows that is more optimized so that it can run on old hardware. What they are doing is running the slow applications remotly, probably using citrix like technology (MS has their own version but I can't remember the name).
So what this probably is is a version of windows that cuts out a few OS features that affects performance, and then preconfiguring it so that it will run a pile of applications from a central server.
Of course, this is something that's always been easy to do on unix. Linux sounds better and better with every announcement comming out of Redmond these days...
A giant "laser beam" ?
What amazes me the most is the amount of bugs a device with 1.7 billion transistors has compared to the number of bugs in, say, Windows XP, GIMP or Firefox.
And don't give me any crap about that software is somehow inherently harder to keep bugfree. I develop both and there really is little difference when it comes to complexity.
Sure, software performs more complex tasks, but when you add 'parallel-ness' of hardware, as well as timing issues, temperature and manufacturing issues, clock distribution, leakage and crosstalk, hardware defenetly is a pretty good match.
The simple truth is that there is simply vastly more testing that goes into hardware then most software (software in mars rovers and lunar landers would be an exception). And I bet that there are better design methods and safty guards too.
So of course heads are going to roll over this, right? TSA will be fined and people will get fired or even brought to court over this, right?
Oh, sorry, i spaced out there for a second. I'm back to the real world now. Of course noone will be punished for this.
When will they ever learn?
When will who learn? Microsoft? They already did. They learned that funding reasearch groups is a great way to portray themselfs as they see fit and at the say time spread FUD about linux and other competitors.
I don't see that big of a risk that projects fork. The only thing that would require forking is if some devs wanted to go with GPL 3 and some wanted to stick with GPL 2. However I don't think the differences between them will be big enough that anyone would go to such drastic measures as forking.
What I am worried about though is how will large projects like the linux kernel transition to the new version? You'd have to hunt down all developers and request permission from each and every one of them. This seems like a next to impossible task for a project that's comming up on its 14th year birthday.
This isn't a problem for projects that either put "or later" in the license, or that transfer the copyright of all contributions to a central body. But neither seem to be the case with the kernel, or did I miss something?
APB does (most likly) not own the copyright to these files, or have permission to distribute them. So therefor they couldn't possibly turn the files into public domain.
It does however make them copyright violators which would be an interesting twist if they got sued. However since only the copyright owners of these files can sue them I'd say that they're pretty safe.
Whoever said that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law clearly didn't know very much law...
This sounds great for developing countries on a tight budget. (Well, medicine seems to be on a tight budget all over the world these days).
Anyone wants to take bets on how long it'll take for some company to create a genetically engineered worm that is slightly more efficient and patents it? And then somehow forces this new worm onto doctors all over the world, for a handsome fee of course.
Amazingly, for such a popular method of 'communication' between and within applications, XML is admitted by most to be rather flawed and bulky...
Yep. That didn't stop Microsoft from adding even more weight to it by creating SOAP though. Now there's a bulky format. It's like shipping a shirt-button in container on an oiltanker.
While it's a good thing that the network protocols are being ordered open, I've never understood why this was chosen. Microsoft has a much stronger hold on the desktop then they do on the server because this is where their lock-in tactics have worked much better.
So why not order the office formats to be opened up instead? These formats is what is forcing people to stick with microsoft upgrade through upgrade. If OpenOffice could flawlessly open word and excel documents there is no doubt in my mind that a mixed microsoft/non-microsoft environment would work much better.
Anyone know why the network protocols were targeted? Or if there is any chance that the office formats will be forced open too?
If an exploit exists in a piece of software and noone around knows about it, does it really exist?
I just wish they would wait until there are a few products out there using this before releasing a crack. That way they can't just continue the new-crack-new-format dance, but will actually have to live with a broken format. Maybe then they will try to rethink their strategy.
Hm... a hockey game where you can use Rocket Propelled Grenades... I think you've got a great idea there!
Ever played speedball 2 on the Amiga? (Might have been released on other platforms as well)
How can anyone be so stupid as to sign a 15 year deal in an industry as changing as end user software. And in games nontheless, and industry that is currently changing at an insane pase.
Here's my prediction. EA is going to continue releasing halfassed titles with the ESPN brand that are nothing more then minor incremental upgrades of previous releases. They're going to pull in some money to start with, but as people start to realize that there are other much better titles out there sales are going to drop.
Inevitibly they will drop so far that the many of the titles are going to be scrapped and fewer and fewer titles are going to be released with the ESPN brand bringing in less and less money for ESPN.
At this point we're probably somewhere 4-8 years down the road.
EA (or EA sports) will either manage to stay valuble on their other types of games, or they will start dropping on the stockmarket.
If they manage to stay valuble the ESPN brand will be sub-leased to other companies making the profit be split up between three companies, as well as making ESPN loose control of their own brand.
If they drop too far in value the exclusive right will eventually be picked up by some other major games company (Microsoft?) and things will restart with them.
I'm guessing we're now somewhere 8-13 years down the road.
What might possibly break this bad cycle is if the exclusive right deal drops so much in value that ESPN can buy it back and do something sensible with their brand in the games industry instead.
All in all this is a great shortterm deal for EA and I send my congratulations to their negotiators (who I'm sure is walking home with a big stack of greens). ESPN is the big looser here as they'll loose out on the getting-very-big computer games market. The general public will loose out on the ability to play great titles with their favourite teams, but they'll still be able to play great games.
Of course all of this is quite obvious. I just wanted to put it down in a slashdot post so that I 10 years from now can point back and say 'I told you so'.
"How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?"
Yeah, what mozilla needs is more people that work on the UI. That'll really help.
Seriously though, the problem with UI in most FOSS apps (and certainly in mozilla) is not a lack of people that know how to create patches for the UI. The lack is in people that know how to design good UI. Actually, i'd think this is true in comercial apps too.
In fact, one of the design-goals for the organisation behind FireFox, have fewer UI designers. This was because the old mozilla suit suffered from the classic too-many-chefs problem when it came to the UI.
The problem with UI is that it's very easy to have an oppinion about it, but it's much harder to do it right. While FireFox and many other applications are getting better, what the FOSS world desperatly needs is more professional UI designers and more professional level testing of UI. Computers are still desperatly hard to use, mostly because of bad UI.
or about 0.77 if you're in Europe
Wow, you're not gonna get far with 0.77 SEK (just over $.1). Or were you hoping that the £0.77 from the UK would even it out?
The big question is.... will it work in Mozilla/Firefox?
I don't think this will have a big effect on the average passanger due to pricing. There is already WiFi on most airports which is just as usefull for people stuck in transfer for hours. However they charge out of the wazoo. Usually you pay something like $20 for a month, which is useless for someone that's just flying through once.
I suspect the exact same thing will happen with WiFi on airplanes. It will be horribly expensive and not worth to bother with unless you *have to* get online (maybe you forgot to turn of your TCP/IP conected stove or some such).