Yes, makes a "small" difference doesn't it. The difference between saying "I made a better engine" and perpetual motion. But who cares about these tiny details.
Netscape 4.x sure was worse than IE5. I remember the relief of changing away from it, even though I had some loyalty to Netscape (even bought two versions of it!). And a lot of the mistake was spending 2-3 years rewriting everything to create Mozilla.
But I would like to THANK Netscape and AOL for the millions of dollars they poured into doing that rewrite. Even though it's not perfect, they (and NOT, mainly, open source developers working for free) created the vast majority of what is now the best browser in the world. There was an enormous amount of code created to do a cross platform toolkit, a fine renderer, and a good javascript implementation.
All that Firefox has done on top of that has been mainly polishing and adjustments. To date, relatively little has been changed at a fundamental level (I guess with FF3 and various new engines that will change).
From the outside, it was very obvious when the funding dried up and Mozilla org was created. For quite a while it appeared that development almost stopped. That was obviously due to most of the engineers beind dismissed.
Appears to be using it's own GUI toolkit, which I can't say I like much, but it's probably inevitable with such wide platform support. It certainly looks full featured. I did immediately strike a bug in that the airbrush doesnt update the screen correctly when zoomed out, until mouse is released. But it is a beta, so thats pretty fair.
It's probably fair not to push it too hard while it's a beta, anyway.
The only thing that bothers me about this is, those sections DON'T turn off even when you pay to remove ads on slashdot. I'm working around this with user CSS modifications which remove them. But Slashdot should be doing it. I sent several emails with no reply, which suggests to me they are being forced to do it (e.g. by OSDN)
If you read the PDF from Brendan, there is a hash code as an attribute on the "innner" tag which the browser matches up. This means that generic code could not be used to close the inner tag, so spyware via general-purpose ads would stop working.
It's almost as if no real person is ENTIRELY good or bad. Could that be? FWIW, some Russians do look back on Stalin's times with nostalgia or respect, even if they acknowledge some of the terrible things he did. Painful and bloody but he did build the industrial base considerably.
Anyway, Stalin alone was not responsible for destroying the Bolsheviks. Pretty early on they found it hard to cope with actually running a country and started squabbling amongst themselves.
Expansionist Russia vs expansionist USA... which do we believe, or disbelieve? Is USA really the "good guys" as they would claim?
After WWII Russia clearly was expansionist - Stalin used the oppportunity to seize lots of countries. But that was 60 years ago under a pyschopath. Then again, the initial assumption of the Bolsheviks was that they WOULD need to force worldwide revolution. But the hard core of Bolsheviks rapidly dissappeared too.
USA has never really been expanisionist in the same sense, but we can see they do like to make their influence felt strongly. In particular they want to trade on their terms and they want to be able to land their military in your country if they feel the need. And lately, there seems to be a much stronger push to force "little USAs" even if people don't actually want them. An assumption of moral superiority.
Do you think there is some truth that capitalism is closer to human nature? Capitalism is not "nice" but it does give people a sound reason to work, ie. survival and comfort.
It always seemed that true believers in communism were a small portion of the Russian popoulation, and even there many of them could not resist taking advantage of the guaranteed salary, health care etc (like you say). That minority of believers essentially used force to hold on to power until people accepted the status quo, as most of us do normally. Then the leadership decayed until they no longer had the heart to keep enforcing it. Reading about Gorbachev's changes, it was obvious he sincerely thought socialism could somehow encompass bits of free market thinking.
I also wondered if perhaps, once there was leadership which had entirely grown up under communism, and therefore assumed it was the right way and didn't need to be enforced - that they no longer had what it took to hold it together. One way to describe this would be that once the leadership honestly believed in socialism, it became impossible to maintain it.
Sorry, no. The Russian people were not, in general, in poverty in the 80's towards the end of the USSR. Sure, they were a way behind the comforts of the west, and the farmers were worse off than the urbanites (by design in Marxism, never could get my head around that), but things were generally manageable. Then they went free-market all at once and most existing organisations collapsed - things got a LOT worse for many people.
Why do you think so many Russians look back on the USSR with nostalgia? It's not just the power, many were actually better off.
It's almost like the free market isn't a panacea, like maybe there is a role for a government to manage things. Nah, that can't be it.
Stupidly , I was under the impression that Mozilla foundation exists in order to develop Mozilla products. Not to give money away to random "worthy" projects.
Yes. It keeps occurring to me that perhaps the net SHOULD be represented as a dangerous, confusing place, because that way people might actually be cautious. Your bank account, credit card, passwords, and PC can be effectively stolen. Sorry Hollywood, you were right! (The Net)
This would be the war to "liberate" Iraq, that you want to win by using every possible weapon indiscriminately? Any amount of civilian casualties are OK, so long as all the "bad guys" get killed and there are "some" civilians left?
I agree, but I don't see any reason to assume there is ANY viable plan which can "win or avoid" the second situation. The US is too disliked, the people too poor, the neighbours too aggressive. Which is one reason why most other countries were saying "don't go".
a) They don't seem to share as much code as I thought - a lot of things are noted as being Firefox-specific in discussions b) In reality the suite lags far behind c) Some of the important changes are in the user interface which is clearly not shared.
These rayguns are fantastic pieces of art, of a kind you rarely see. I saw them at the Weta stand at an expo in Wellington - they were only on display then, not for sale - and they really look like the business as imagined by 1950's science fiction. They seem a little used, covered in mysterious spikes and weird tubes. And it's real glass and metal, as far as I can tell, hand-welded etc. Theres a good sense of humour in the marketing too.
Pretty amazing to see so many cynics completely miss the point on Slashdot. This is one thing I thought most geeks would be right into. Humorous yet artistic rayguns!
Satellites don't generally fall out of the sky unless they are in LEO and need frequent reboosts. If a moon-based system breaks down, it's junk too (although not orbiting). Anti-satellite missiles are not a likely threat at this stage, especially not to peaceful satellites. It will be even MORE awkward to work around problems because the moon is so much harder to get to than an orbiting satellite.
So, in conclusion, none of those are very convincing reasons for a greatly increased cost.
But it DOES mean longstanding bugs are being ignored.
No developer likes to work on fixing horrible tricky bugs, and I don't blame volunteers for not doing it on Mozilla. But Mozilla foundation is earning *millions of dollars* now from Google, so I *do* expect some of their paid developers to simply spend their time on the hard slog of fixing old, significant bugs. Thats one of the main reasons why you would want paid developers on it.
Instead, all the core developers have fun AND get paid, working on exciting new rendering toolkits and the like.
Although I like the decreased memory usage of seamonkey over TB+FF (saves basically 50% of the RAM), and the more powerful preferences etc, I think we have to face the fact that minimal effort is going to Seamonkey (just a few hardy volunteers) and FF+TB are going to be far ahead of them normally.
They won't be called on to kill Americans, they'll be called on to kill "terrorists" and "Muslim extremists". And they would do it, like many soldiers have in the past. It's just a sad fact of human nature that you can use slogans and isolation to dehumanise a group and then get people to do whatever you want to them.
Arguments about copyright based on data from 1883-1964 seem unlikely have strong bearing on the information age. Its easy to imagine, if the cost of re-registering copyright was small, everyone who ever released something copyrighted would automatically renew it indefinitely. Of course the really worthless ideas might be forgotten, but anything someone hopes to make money out of would not. Presto, every significant work has indefinite copyright.
Only barely. Sounds like it was very close to a Chernobyl. If their makeshift coolant pump had also failed for some reason (like many others had already), then it would have been exposed core and meltdown time.
Even in a free market democracy, people are complacent, careless, greedy, dumb and just plain human.
Where are you talking about? Most places in the world, local calls are "free" (which means there is a fixed charge per month), for home lines. In addition you get a phone number that people can call, a phonebook listing, etc. Most places you can't unbundle these.
What useful content is going to be rendered while the applet loads?
Other pages. Heard of tabbed browsing? Windows? Oh sorry, I should sit there staring dumbly at my browser while it grinds away loading up . No, most things get loaded in the background and I look at them when they are finished.
In the case of Mozilla suite (Seamonkey) it also holds up the email client, but I think thats more a fault of Mozilla...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, makes a "small" difference doesn't it. The difference between saying "I made a better engine" and perpetual motion.
But who cares about these tiny details.
Netscape 4.x sure was worse than IE5. I remember the relief of changing away from it, even though I had some loyalty to Netscape (even bought two versions of it!). And a lot of the mistake was spending 2-3 years rewriting everything to create Mozilla.
But I would like to THANK Netscape and AOL for the millions of dollars they poured into doing that rewrite. Even though it's not perfect, they (and NOT, mainly, open source developers working for free) created the vast majority of what is now the best browser in the world. There was an enormous amount of code created to do a cross platform toolkit, a fine renderer, and a good javascript implementation.
All that Firefox has done on top of that has been mainly polishing and adjustments. To date, relatively little has been changed at a fundamental level (I guess with FF3 and various new engines that will change).
From the outside, it was very obvious when the funding dried up and Mozilla org was created. For quite a while it appeared that development almost stopped. That was obviously due to most of the engineers beind dismissed.
So, thanks again Netscape and AOL (!)
Appears to be using it's own GUI toolkit, which I can't say I like much, but it's probably inevitable with such wide platform support. It certainly looks full featured.
I did immediately strike a bug in that the airbrush doesnt update the screen correctly when zoomed out, until mouse is released. But it is a beta, so thats pretty fair.
It's probably fair not to push it too hard while it's a beta, anyway.
The only thing that bothers me about this is, those sections DON'T turn off even when you pay to remove ads on slashdot.
I'm working around this with user CSS modifications which remove them. But Slashdot should be doing it. I sent several emails with no reply, which suggests to me they are being forced to do it (e.g. by OSDN)
If you read the PDF from Brendan, there is a hash code as an attribute on the "innner" tag which the browser matches up. This means that generic code could not be used to close the inner tag, so spyware via general-purpose ads would stop working.
It's almost as if no real person is ENTIRELY good or bad. Could that be? FWIW, some Russians do look back on Stalin's times with nostalgia or respect, even if they acknowledge some of the terrible things he did. Painful and bloody but he did build the industrial base considerably.
Anyway, Stalin alone was not responsible for destroying the Bolsheviks. Pretty early on they found it hard to cope with actually running a country and started squabbling amongst themselves.
A multiplatform clone of Photoshop for $38??? Is this some kind of joke, or the best deal in picture editing ever?
How come these kinds of things never get found
Maybe his marketing is terrible...
Expansionist Russia vs expansionist USA... which do we believe, or disbelieve? Is USA really the "good guys" as they would claim?
After WWII Russia clearly was expansionist - Stalin used the oppportunity to seize lots of countries. But that was 60 years ago under a pyschopath. Then again, the initial assumption of the Bolsheviks was that they WOULD need to force worldwide revolution. But the hard core of Bolsheviks rapidly dissappeared too.
USA has never really been expanisionist in the same sense, but we can see they do like to make their influence felt strongly. In particular they want to trade on their terms and they want to be able to land their military in your country if they feel the need. And lately, there seems to be a much stronger push to force "little USAs" even if people don't actually want them. An assumption of moral superiority.
Do you think there is some truth that capitalism is closer to human nature? Capitalism is not "nice" but it does give people a sound reason to work, ie. survival and comfort.
It always seemed that true believers in communism were a small portion of the Russian popoulation, and even there many of them could not resist taking advantage of the guaranteed salary, health care etc (like you say). That minority of believers essentially used force to hold on to power until people accepted the status quo, as most of us do normally. Then the leadership decayed until they no longer had the heart to keep enforcing it. Reading about Gorbachev's changes, it was obvious he sincerely thought socialism could somehow encompass bits of free market thinking.
I also wondered if perhaps, once there was leadership which had entirely grown up under communism, and therefore assumed it was the right way and didn't need to be enforced - that they no longer had what it took to hold it together. One way to describe this would be that once the leadership honestly believed in socialism, it became impossible to maintain it.
Sorry, no. The Russian people were not, in general, in poverty in the 80's towards the end of the USSR. Sure, they were a way behind the comforts of the west, and the farmers were worse off than the urbanites (by design in Marxism, never could get my head around that), but things were generally manageable. Then they went free-market all at once and most existing organisations collapsed - things got a LOT worse for many people.
Why do you think so many Russians look back on the USSR with nostalgia? It's not just the power, many were actually better off.
It's almost like the free market isn't a panacea, like maybe there is a role for a government to manage things. Nah, that can't be it.
Stupidly , I was under the impression that Mozilla foundation exists in order to develop Mozilla products.
Not to give money away to random "worthy" projects.
Yes. It keeps occurring to me that perhaps the net SHOULD be represented as a dangerous, confusing place, because that way people might actually be cautious. Your bank account, credit card, passwords, and PC can be effectively stolen. Sorry Hollywood, you were right! (The Net)
This would be the war to "liberate" Iraq, that you want to win by using every possible weapon indiscriminately?
Any amount of civilian casualties are OK, so long as all the "bad guys" get killed and there are "some" civilians left?
I agree, but I don't see any reason to assume there is ANY viable plan which can "win or avoid" the second situation. The US is too disliked, the people too poor, the neighbours too aggressive. Which is one reason why most other countries were saying "don't go".
Yes, I thought it would be like this too, but:
a) They don't seem to share as much code as I thought - a lot of things are noted as being Firefox-specific in discussions
b) In reality the suite lags far behind
c) Some of the important changes are in the user interface which is clearly not shared.
These rayguns are fantastic pieces of art, of a kind you rarely see. I saw them at the Weta stand at an expo in Wellington - they were only on display then, not for sale - and they really look like the business as imagined by 1950's science fiction. They seem a little used, covered in mysterious spikes and weird tubes. And it's real glass and metal, as far as I can tell, hand-welded etc. Theres a good sense of humour in the marketing too.
Pretty amazing to see so many cynics completely miss the point on Slashdot. This is one thing I thought most geeks would be right into. Humorous yet artistic rayguns!
Satellites don't generally fall out of the sky unless they are in LEO and need frequent reboosts. If a moon-based system breaks down, it's junk too (although not orbiting). Anti-satellite missiles are not a likely threat at this stage, especially not to peaceful satellites.
It will be even MORE awkward to work around problems because the moon is so much harder to get to than an orbiting satellite.
So, in conclusion, none of those are very convincing reasons for a greatly increased cost.
But it DOES mean longstanding bugs are being ignored.
No developer likes to work on fixing horrible tricky bugs, and I don't blame volunteers for not doing it on Mozilla. But Mozilla foundation is earning *millions of dollars* now from Google, so I *do* expect some of their paid developers to simply spend their time on the hard slog of fixing old, significant bugs. Thats one of the main reasons why you would want paid developers on it.
Instead, all the core developers have fun AND get paid, working on exciting new rendering toolkits and the like.
Although I like the decreased memory usage of seamonkey over TB+FF (saves basically 50% of the RAM), and the more powerful preferences etc, I think we have to face the fact that minimal effort is going to Seamonkey (just a few hardy volunteers) and FF+TB are going to be far ahead of them normally.
They won't be called on to kill Americans, they'll be called on to kill "terrorists" and "Muslim extremists". And they would do it, like many soldiers have in the past. It's just a sad fact of human nature that you can use slogans and isolation to dehumanise a group and then get people to do whatever you want to them.
Arguments about copyright based on data from 1883-1964 seem unlikely have strong bearing on the information age. Its easy to imagine, if the cost of re-registering copyright was small, everyone who ever released something copyrighted would automatically renew it indefinitely. Of course the really worthless ideas might be forgotten, but anything someone hopes to make money out of would not. Presto, every significant work has indefinite copyright.
Only barely. Sounds like it was very close to a Chernobyl. If their makeshift coolant pump had also failed for some reason (like many others had already), then it would have been exposed core and meltdown time.
Even in a free market democracy, people are complacent, careless, greedy, dumb and just plain human.
Where are you talking about? Most places in the world, local calls are "free" (which means there is a fixed charge per month), for home lines. In addition you get a phone number that people can call, a phonebook listing, etc. Most places you can't unbundle these.
At least those guys are honest. Then there is the 50% of web developers who put an email address and ignore everything that is sent to it.
What useful content is going to be rendered while the applet loads?
...
Other pages. Heard of tabbed browsing? Windows? Oh sorry, I should sit there staring dumbly at my browser while it grinds away loading up . No, most things get loaded in the background and I look at them when they are finished.
In the case of Mozilla suite (Seamonkey) it also holds up the email client, but I think thats more a fault of Mozilla