I added all those adjectives at the beginning because if you're willing to write and install a Mozilla XPCOM control or ActiveX or something that exposes a socket you can do it. But that is, presumably, not what you meant since you mentioned not needing to install components.
AFAIK you can access sockets without installing an XPCOM component into mozilla chrome by requesting the privledge. Something like (although my example is for file access):
Flash-forward to a couple of years ago, when Bill sent out yet another all-hands memo, pointing the company in the direction of security. At first, we all laughed. But now it's becoming more and more obvious that they're taking security every bit as seriously as they once took the Internet. They are aiming to be the top of the heap in security, and they've got drive, ambition and aggression.
Okay if this were fuzzy logic class you'd get a distinction. But it's not.
The internet has been integrated with most applications because it was easy. To add the internet to your application you just need to strap on some more code. It's a trivial task, and microsoft still had it's troubles (as you pointed out). But your analogy is flawed...
repeat after me: SECURITY IS NOT AN AFTERTHOUGHT.
I have no doubt that microsoft's products will be more secure in the future. But it's terribly hard for a company as large as microsoft to change their processes. Plus they have an amazing amount of backwards compatibility to uphold. This won't be anything like the first browser wars.
The thing you are overlooking is to make this analogy correct, the Star Trek Replication Device needs to 1) use energy/cost something to replicate, and 2) just make the diet coke without the packaging.
As much as people don't like to admit it, People like to promote what they are consuming. Especially and sometimes only when it's good. People like to know what the contents are. People like to know they aren't breaking the law. People don't like waiting for a download/replication.
It's all about economics of scale. The movie companies can afford to give you a better product for your money because they are mass producing it. You can have an inferior product for cheaper, but if it's a good product, it will encourage more purchases.
Copying of movies is encouraging innovation.
As for your analogy, EVEN if it were correct and replication did not cost anything, and was instant (for time is money) and you got the packaging, what's wrong with the market dying? People will still invent new soft drinks but for the fun of it rather than for profit. You're practically telling me that open source doesn't work, and if it did, people would stop selling software.
Organized systems will decay towards randomness without energy input
Forgive my ignorance, but with my limited knowledge of physics, this sounds like the most stupid thing I've heard in a long time. What about that thing we call inertia? To me, it doesn't make sense that anything would do anything without energy. How do you not need energy to get in a disorganised state? If you're organised, then you'll stay organised, unless some force is acting upon you. If the force acting on you is gravity, then you have kenetic energy.
If there is some new way of things moving without energy, I'd really like to know about it.
Finally I'm glad someone agrees with me! ECMAscript is awesome. I've just been designing a website recently and it has been years since i found programming to be a joy.
I really hope XUL takes off. Sure it needs to mature a lot (iTunes style widgets and documentation please!) and a decent gui editor.. but they are only a matter of time.
That's just a view on the source. That's not architecture documentation.
From what i've seen, there is a fair bit on extension making, one of my favorite sites is xulplanet.
The problem is with the architecture documentation. Sure you can work out what XPCOM is, easily enough. But if you look at the mailing lists there are a plethora of people working on writing plugins that utilise the javascript interface to XPCOM, and they don't know the difference between invoking an interface and queryInterface.
For the browser market share that firefox has, it should have a lot more plugins being written for it. But many developers are simply putting it in the too hard basket.
Do you have a suggestion for a better solution to IDN spoofing concerns?
Why doesn't firefox just check the current locale of the user, and if there are characters outside that locale, make the address bar red and display a warning similar to the popup blocker one.. a bar across the top of the screen.
Or maybe even better would be to only do the red address bar thing if there are characters from two seperate locales.
1) Amend the IDN spec to require that valid IDN urls use the lowest-numbered codepoints that match that glyph.
2) Have browsers use a table that identifies all the characters that share a glyph. Any invalid IDNs are mapped down to the lowest codepoints before the browser goes there, so a link to a fake paypal.com address actually goes to the real paypal.com address.
What about glyphs that are nearly the same (as in one or two pixels out)? I think a better solution is to highlight the address red (with a clickable warning icon next to it - similar to how firefox handles ssl) if there are characters that aren't in the current locale.
Why should the work of Michaelangelo be "Priceless", yet the sketchings of an NYC street artist fixed at $15? Surely the provenance is different, but beyond the origins there should be no discernable difference in importance.
Art is a commodity. It's all about demand. Sometimes demand is inflated from personal demand because of the scarceness of a particular piece. As Andy Warhol once said, "Good business is the best art of all". C'mon, this is first year visual arts degree type stuff.
So then why should we pay "Artists" for producing their art? If the expression "Writers Write. Painters Paint. Singers Sing" holds true, then these tools are simply performing their function and thus shouldn't be singled out for deserving praise or reward above any other.
I'm not sure what bit of supply and demand you don't understand.
So what if a particular tool is adept at producing a result you find either pleasing or revolting? Is your subjective taste, or the taste of a majority, enough to qualify Art as Art? If I am the only person who sees the beauty in an object, am I all the more rich for holding a truly unique perspective? Is my perspective then, itself an art?
Read about Duchamp and his toilet. He showed that art isn't about what you make. It's just expressing something. Pointing something out. The product doesn't matter, but a product with wide appeal is instantly more marketable. Art is the purest form of marketting there is.
Then how do computer chips work? If they don't run on energy, what do they run on? Maybe you've discovered perpetual motion.
Any energy lost is lost because the insulator isn't insulating 100% or the conductor isn't conducting 100%. Make a better insulator and conductor and you could run on next to nothing. But you'd still need energy.
The GUI clients for MySQL are lacking... I'm still confused what cheap/free GUI clients are available for MySQL since MySQL.com abandonded their MySQLGUI project.
This is a place where i can really see mozilla as a platform/XUL shining. There is already an addin for mozilla to access SQL directly here. The only thing i'm waiting on is an itunes style editable treeview - at the moment you can put progress meters and tickboxes in a tree cell, but you can't make them editable. And you can't make an editbox appear over the cell you double click on because of this bug. (copy this location into a new window as bugzilla doesn't allow slashdot referers).
XUL has massive advantages over Access because it's all human readable/editable. It's a shame the learning curve of mozilla's codebase is so steep otherwise i'd add editability to the tree myself.
It'd also do things like assert all frees were things that were actually allocated and stuff.
That requires source modification to get into place, though.
Can't you just use LD_PRELOAD as a way around source modification?
You're right here, this happens. MSIE is VERY good at rendering malformed HTML. Some have speculated that this was done to prevent HTML standards from being followed by most developers, but in any case, the HTML you're seeing messed up *is* malformed. At a fundamental level it's the website's fault. If you do have to use one of those pages, do make sure you e-mail the maintainer. Often they will fix it. As FF's marketshare increases, expect this to change.
That's why I'd love to see XHTML become standard. It's so much easier to validate - it would be trivial to add a validator to firefox and/or nvu/composer. Another great thing about xhtml is namespaces - which effectively allow OLE. You can embed SVG, XUL, etc. in your document trivally. Another great feature is the ability to use XSLT to transform the documents to whatever the heck you want. All we really need to nvu/composer support for xhtml to get the ball rolling.
Hi QuantumG - it's ^moo^ here. Not sure if you remember me but cheers for STAOG.:)
I've been working on a project to do something along these lines for a fair few months now. My problem is everytime i get around to writing a functional spec I think of a new feature.
It would be great if you could do the middle click thing to get into the source code, and then use webdav to store it so you've got a history of the old code - rather like a revision control system.
One of the many things that has got in my way has been XUL's immaturity. For example, I wanted an itunes style spreadsheet (treeview) where you can double click on a field to edit it. Well you can't do that in XUL. And the hack I thought of (using a stack or grid and moving a editbox over the position of the tree you click in) doesn't work because of a bug with rendering in two different contexts which makes the cursor disappear - try navigating an edit field with no cursor.
But I too have been thinking about emailing patches. This would properly leverage the power of open source. you could set up a (or a few) central repositry/s where people vote wfor what patches they like and automagically download them.
It would really rock if NVU/mozilla composer worked with xhtml so people that just knew that could make extentions to their browser.
Does anyone out there know how "desktop search" is supposed to improve the way I do work when most of the time I am either creating new data (programs, documents, etc.) for a specific purpose or playing games? Am I missing something about the power of "searching" in general?
The short answer, yes - you're missing something. Don't you ever save web pages on your computer? Do you know the contents of all the emails that other people send to you? All your chat sessions?
The power of desktop search is searching within documents.. especially those created by other people. I routinely save web pages of things i'm researching. To give an example, I recently did a XUL project. I researched everything related to XUL, and saved the web pages in a folder. There were hundreds. I knew I had seen information inside them that i needed, but which one? Google desktop search to the rescue. Sure, grep would have done this job fine. But what happens when you've got various documents in different locations? grep all the directories? Just because you can't find a use for it, doesn't mean there isn't one.
Emails are another prime example. Fast, fulltext searching of emails using the same interface as your search for everything else is invaluable.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's just a illusion caused by the brain, then howcome the moon is different sizes in photos too?
AFAIK you can access sockets without installing an XPCOM component into mozilla chrome by requesting the privledge. Something like (although my example is for file access):
The user will get a warning dialog asking if they want to give the script the appropriate privledge, but that's all.
Alternately, ActiveX can do it without you installing a component - hence why ActiveX is a load of shit and a massive security risk.
Okay if this were fuzzy logic class you'd get a distinction. But it's not.
The internet has been integrated with most applications because it was easy. To add the internet to your application you just need to strap on some more code. It's a trivial task, and microsoft still had it's troubles (as you pointed out). But your analogy is flawed...
repeat after me: SECURITY IS NOT AN AFTERTHOUGHT.
I have no doubt that microsoft's products will be more secure in the future. But it's terribly hard for a company as large as microsoft to change their processes. Plus they have an amazing amount of backwards compatibility to uphold. This won't be anything like the first browser wars.
The thing you are overlooking is to make this analogy correct, the Star Trek Replication Device needs to 1) use energy/cost something to replicate, and 2) just make the diet coke without the packaging.
As much as people don't like to admit it, People like to promote what they are consuming. Especially and sometimes only when it's good. People like to know what the contents are. People like to know they aren't breaking the law. People don't like waiting for a download/replication.
It's all about economics of scale. The movie companies can afford to give you a better product for your money because they are mass producing it. You can have an inferior product for cheaper, but if it's a good product, it will encourage more purchases.
Copying of movies is encouraging innovation.
As for your analogy, EVEN if it were correct and replication did not cost anything, and was instant (for time is money) and you got the packaging, what's wrong with the market dying? People will still invent new soft drinks but for the fun of it rather than for profit. You're practically telling me that open source doesn't work, and if it did, people would stop selling software.
What? Released a unix based OS? Contributed to the Open Source movement? Contributed to standards rather than using proprietry formats?
Forgive my ignorance, but with my limited knowledge of physics, this sounds like the most stupid thing I've heard in a long time. What about that thing we call inertia? To me, it doesn't make sense that anything would do anything without energy. How do you not need energy to get in a disorganised state? If you're organised, then you'll stay organised, unless some force is acting upon you. If the force acting on you is gravity, then you have kenetic energy.
If there is some new way of things moving without energy, I'd really like to know about it.
Finally I'm glad someone agrees with me! ECMAscript is awesome. I've just been designing a website recently and it has been years since i found programming to be a joy.
I really hope XUL takes off. Sure it needs to mature a lot (iTunes style widgets and documentation please!) and a decent gui editor.. but they are only a matter of time.
But at least you get to use the google search engine to find the google services.
That's just a view on the source. That's not architecture documentation.
From what i've seen, there is a fair bit on extension making, one of my favorite sites is xulplanet.
The problem is with the architecture documentation. Sure you can work out what XPCOM is, easily enough. But if you look at the mailing lists there are a plethora of people working on writing plugins that utilise the javascript interface to XPCOM, and they don't know the difference between invoking an interface and queryInterface.
For the browser market share that firefox has, it should have a lot more plugins being written for it. But many developers are simply putting it in the too hard basket.
Why doesn't firefox just check the current locale of the user, and if there are characters outside that locale, make the address bar red and display a warning similar to the popup blocker one.. a bar across the top of the screen.
Or maybe even better would be to only do the red address bar thing if there are characters from two seperate locales.
What about glyphs that are nearly the same (as in one or two pixels out)? I think a better solution is to highlight the address red (with a clickable warning icon next to it - similar to how firefox handles ssl) if there are characters that aren't in the current locale.
Who said text-based adventures are dead? ;)
have you filed a bug on bugzilla?
Art is a commodity. It's all about demand. Sometimes demand is inflated from personal demand because of the scarceness of a particular piece. As Andy Warhol once said, "Good business is the best art of all". C'mon, this is first year visual arts degree type stuff.
I'm not sure what bit of supply and demand you don't understand.
Read about Duchamp and his toilet. He showed that art isn't about what you make. It's just expressing something. Pointing something out. The product doesn't matter, but a product with wide appeal is instantly more marketable. Art is the purest form of marketting there is.
it's lucky for you intelligence is inherited from your mother.
Have you ever used iTunes? What do you think Soundcheck is? It's normalisation (volume-equalization or AGC as you'd call it).
iTunes is the place you'd want to import m3u playlists, not the actual ipod.
Then how do computer chips work? If they don't run on energy, what do they run on? Maybe you've discovered perpetual motion.
Any energy lost is lost because the insulator isn't insulating 100% or the conductor isn't conducting 100%. Make a better insulator and conductor and you could run on next to nothing. But you'd still need energy.
This is a place where i can really see mozilla as a platform/XUL shining. There is already an addin for mozilla to access SQL directly here. The only thing i'm waiting on is an itunes style editable treeview - at the moment you can put progress meters and tickboxes in a tree cell, but you can't make them editable. And you can't make an editbox appear over the cell you double click on because of this bug. (copy this location into a new window as bugzilla doesn't allow slashdot referers).
XUL has massive advantages over Access because it's all human readable/editable. It's a shame the learning curve of mozilla's codebase is so steep otherwise i'd add editability to the tree myself.
Can't you just use LD_PRELOAD as a way around source modification?
That's why I'd love to see XHTML become standard. It's so much easier to validate - it would be trivial to add a validator to firefox and/or nvu/composer. Another great thing about xhtml is namespaces - which effectively allow OLE. You can embed SVG, XUL, etc. in your document trivally. Another great feature is the ability to use XSLT to transform the documents to whatever the heck you want. All we really need to nvu/composer support for xhtml to get the ball rolling.
So what you're basically saying is that there is no way of telling if what they are saying is accurate or a load of shit.
Hi QuantumG - it's ^moo^ here. Not sure if you remember me but cheers for STAOG. :)
I've been working on a project to do something along these lines for a fair few months now. My problem is everytime i get around to writing a functional spec I think of a new feature.
It would be great if you could do the middle click thing to get into the source code, and then use webdav to store it so you've got a history of the old code - rather like a revision control system.
One of the many things that has got in my way has been XUL's immaturity. For example, I wanted an itunes style spreadsheet (treeview) where you can double click on a field to edit it. Well you can't do that in XUL. And the hack I thought of (using a stack or grid and moving a editbox over the position of the tree you click in) doesn't work because of a bug with rendering in two different contexts which makes the cursor disappear - try navigating an edit field with no cursor.
But I too have been thinking about emailing patches. This would properly leverage the power of open source. you could set up a (or a few) central repositry/s where people vote wfor what patches they like and automagically download them.
It would really rock if NVU/mozilla composer worked with xhtml so people that just knew that could make extentions to their browser.
Anyway gotta get back to work.
what if you pay them in electricity?
you have to swap batteries anyway. Now you just have to swap them more often.
The short answer, yes - you're missing something. Don't you ever save web pages on your computer? Do you know the contents of all the emails that other people send to you? All your chat sessions?
The power of desktop search is searching within documents.. especially those created by other people. I routinely save web pages of things i'm researching. To give an example, I recently did a XUL project. I researched everything related to XUL, and saved the web pages in a folder. There were hundreds. I knew I had seen information inside them that i needed, but which one? Google desktop search to the rescue. Sure, grep would have done this job fine. But what happens when you've got various documents in different locations? grep all the directories? Just because you can't find a use for it, doesn't mean there isn't one.
Emails are another prime example. Fast, fulltext searching of emails using the same interface as your search for everything else is invaluable.