It takes more to market software than it does to write it. Obviously, this may not be true for items sold on shareware chennels, but it is otherwise mostly true.
So -- running those servers doesn't cost AOL much. (They could put it on ATDN.) A skeleton staff of developers and QA doesn't cost much either (and hey, they could always offshore it:-p). This skeleton crew would ensure that AOL's long term interests are broadly met by the moz.org crew.
On the other hand, AOL would save money is by choosing not to release commercial, AOL/Netscape branded browsers based on Gecko. It would save money in not marketing and promoting it. It would even save money on documentation, evangelisation and user support. This would give MS a reason to stay honest, because AOL would still have the flexibility of hiking their commitment to moz the moment they felt MS started playing dirty. AOL gets max. ROI on min. investment.
> This comment is either naive, sarcastic, paid-for or just plain really stupid.
And the parent comment was written by the bastard child of the goatse.cx man. Do you want to get into a name-calling match, or do you want constructive debate? Oh wait, this is an AC. On Slashdot.
> If AOL is prudent, it will pray for peace and prepare for war.
Which is why I said, the best that may happen is that AOL will keep a meaningful developer presence in mozilla.org as a sort of long term insurance against any "funny stuff" from MS, and to ensure that their interests are taken care of by the OSS community. At the same time, they'll look to cutting cost by not committing to releasing an AOL/Netscape branded browser. I simply cannot see AOL releasing Netscape versions for the next seven years unless its financial health improves dramatically.
What I meant was Seamonkey will die a double death: moz.org is moving away from it, and I expect AOL to stop shipping it too, within the year. When Firebird v1.0 ships, with AOL support or without, it will be extremely unlikely that AOL will release a Netscape-branded version of Firebird.
Anyway, I don't think anyone here will mourn the death of the commercial Netscape distribution, although as one AC in this thread pointed out, Netscape's engineers did play a decent role in getting bugs fixed in the browser.
LOL! incidentally, the post you replied to was posted using Phoenix 0.5 (haven't gotten around moving to 0.6 yet)
But I wonder -- with AOL and MS moving towards IE, and the commercial Netscape vanishing, *and* old Netscape diehards (like Citibank) gradually coming around to the IE path, what's to stop web developers (who are lazy anyway) from creating sites that "work only with IE"?
I fear that by the time Firebird v1.0 comes around, IE will be so entrenched with commercial sites that most users will not see it worth the hassle to switch to something else.
I may be being extremely stupid here, but why would they use IE over Gecko. No compliance and the posibility of restrictions vs. W3C compliance and nice shiny open sourceness. The choice seems obvious to me
Ah, the naïvete of the young. Imagine me, a old curmudgeon at AOLTW, sitting in my office and wondering how the stock has tanked.
I get a $750M cash offer, which is very pleasant to have. Promises of cooperation. Whispers of "you won't have pay all those Netscape engineers and QA any more, our IE team will work with you to integrate mshtml into AOL".
I see prospects of not paying lawyers. I see not fighting one of the world's most cash-rich companies in a draining legal battle that analysts give me hell about in each earnings call. I see some prospect of working together instead of slugging it out.
I hear how 95% of the web already uses IE. And how MS is 'committed' to making the best better with time*.
And the choice seems pretty obvious to me.
* btw: MS's PDC conference in october is supposed to have some pretty neat news about the next version of IE. Expect UI tweaks (popup blocking at least, not sure about tabs), managed code and a significantly better security model.
Yes, mozilla.org won't go away, but the commercial Netscape browser -- that could well die (and a good thing too, it was a pig, with AOL adding over 20MB of its own junk)
The best that may happen is that AOL will keep a meaningful developer presence in mozilla.org as a sort of long term insurance against any "funny stuff" from MS, and to ensure that their interests are taken care of by the OSS community -- but don't bet on it happening.
The commercial Netscape browser (Seamonkey) will almost certainly stop being pushed real soon now (which in a way is convenient because Moz fans should switch to Firebird anyway) I honestly can't see a cash-strapped AOL paying for Netscape engineers and QA to continue working on Seamonkey -- especially if MS plays nice (and MS has no reasons to *not* play nice, their antitrust battles are dying down one by one.)
I believe that Gator also stopped this practice (although I could be wrong about this) some time ago. Note that the CNet article you reference is more than 12 months old.
I saw a security warning for their pestilential Precision Time Manager (signed by Gator) less than three days back.
And I agree with you -- the folk who let Gator get installed *are* often lazy and indifferent. But that does not excuse what Gator does -- it remains a cheap, underhanded thing to do.
Re:Gator by Choice, WTF?
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Finally, I think it is inappropriate to classify Gator as "spyware" any longer. I challenge anyone to find an instance where Gator installs itself surreptitiously on a users browser any longer.
Then why do I still see Gator being delivered to end-users via drive-by downloads, then? Granted, they clicked yes on a freaking dialog, but if you polled users, you'd find the vast majority of them did so by mistake.
That makes Gator a petty little company increasing its userbase by taking advantage of user ignorance, in my book.
Um, in the same way that Java is a 'cheap' Smalltalk knock-off? Next you'll be telling me that Sun invented the virtual machine, byte-code, OO, and OO APIs.
Both Java and C# are OO-lite languages ("blue-collar", as Gosling calls them) designed for rapid, uncomplicated OO development -- nothing wrong, as long as you realize languages are just tools.
And oh, those who write c-sharp as seahash are about as pathetic as the ones who write windoze instead of windows. Wish people learnt that no one gives a flying fuck about their oh-so-cute name for MS' "illegitimate child".
Seriously, the guys in India, Russia, et. al. are working their asses off for far less money than IT professionals make here. Do you think they are spending their time wondering how to goof off?
The oddest thing is, most IT managers in India don't consider reading Slashdot == goofing off (guess they just read it for the news). A lot of them actually considering a decent site for tech news, even if somewhat speculative (ahem!)
Go see allegedly high-born castes ("Brahmins") pull rickshaws (human-powered carts) in Patna.
Go see Rajasthani Meenas (a "low-born" caste, under-developed until a few decades ago) get into the India's Civil Service and get cushy jobs in ever increasing numbers (affirmative action has helped somewhat here).
Look at the politics and bureaucracy of almost any South Indian state (especially Tamil Nadu) and see how Brahmins have practically been eliminated from both these spheres.
Look at how powerful the so-called lower-castes and tribals are in the north, in UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.
Sure, caste isn't finished in India (it has had 2500 years to flourish here, after all) but things are a lot better now for 'low-born' Indians today. And that is a Good Thing(tm).
Today, how successful you are is usually decided by how well educated you are. And that's the way things should be. And thanks to affirmative action, there are *lots* of "low-born" Indians who get excellent education, 'reserved' seats in the best colleges and free/highly subsidized education, even in college and grad school.
... and INR is how the Indian Rupee is written formally (e.g. in financial transactions) where you don't want to confuse it with the Indonesian Rupiah, the Pakistani Rupee, the Nepali Rupee, etc.
But yes, in informal usage "Rs" is used exclusively.
Considering this service has just started, that too as a pilot project (available initially in one exchange per city), I'd have to say that your `punjab' friend was talking through his turban.:)
Calcutta (Kolkata) is actually one of the poorest metropolises in India, and it has one of the lowest costs of living in urban India. On the other hand, that minimum wage of Rs 2000 is for unskilled workers. For a person with a engineering degree, 5000-6000 would be a more realistic minimum wage.
840 is dinner for 4 people at Peter Cat, an upscale, trendy, expensive restaurant (where someone bought me dinner), and the guy buying dinner winced when he saw the bill (a local physician).
I've been to Peter Cat before, and I'll say this: it's great, but compared with upscale restaurants throughout the country, it's cheap. Dinner for two at a similar place in Madras can easily set you back Rs 1000, and Bombay and Delhi are even more expensive.
What makes Saddam (and the rulers in Syria, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, the wahhabis in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the lunatics in N.Korea) `special' is that they routinely export terror into countries that have no way of striking back ("asymmetrical warfare") because there is no formal declaration of war, and all the other formal things that real countries fighting real wars do.
Saddam's ties with weapons suppliers in the middle-east (through Syria mostly) is well-known, and more information will emerge in the days to come.
Usually, the countries that suffer are (surprise!) the two non-Islamic democracies that border West and East of the middle-east: Israel and India (although the former Soviet republics, and even China, can tell you how charming Islamic terrorists can be). The US has only been a very recent target of these groups, but the US' ability to retaliate is on a far higher level that most of the other targets.
There are plenty of regimes that do the same, but I don't see thousands of troops pouring into those countries, do you?
Hey, we've just gotten started!;-)
Its O.K, you can ignore me. After all, you're morally superiour (Sounds familiar...Heil!), arn't you?
Never said I was `morally superiour' [sic], so stop putting *your* words into *my* mouth. And FYI, I don't think my value system, religion, etc., is `superior', it's merely the case that I object to being shot at/bombed by a suicide bomber when I'm on my way to work/at a deli/in the subway. I have a selfish interest in not ending up dead.
OTOH, you *could* be ignored because you choose to not stand behind your words, instead you post anonymously. You needn't give your email address away, open a/. journal and let people respond to that. Responding to ACs is not quite worth it.
Here's another one: "Saddam Hussein is a murdering louse who has raped Iraq for too long."
Or how about, "Saddam Hussein leads a regime which openly advocates suicide bombings, killing civilians and violating the laws of war, including the white flag of truce; and has `rogue regime' written all over it."
I get uptimes of 20-30 days on my Windows 2000 box (512MB RAM) without logging out, which i use as a workstation (usually 10-20 IE/Phoenix/Opera windows open + VS.net + at least 2-3 Office XP tasks, plus 3 messengers + pageant + antivirus + Winamp2 + Outlook XP. I'd get more but I run Windows Update every ~20-30 days for the security updates (which ask me to reboot).
Only bug I've noticed is that explorer.exe sometimes fouls up its icon cache every 14 days or so, though restarting explorer.exe via the Task Manager solves that problem.
This is much better than my experience of X sessions on Linux that'd force me to exit X once in 3-7 days or so (I'd love to know what uptimes other get with X -- am I doing something wrong? (Redhat 7.1 on a (dualbooting) Dell Optiplex)).
I'd just like to add -- make no mistake, Windows 2000 (and XP, though I don't like its default looks -- you can make it look it Win98 if you want though) line is *great* as a graphic workstation. When you consider that Win2k SP3 added a great compatibility layer (WinXP has a better one though) then Win2K looks sweeter than OSX because of broader app availability.
You don't say someone is spamming TAOCP when he recommends a good book on data structures/algorithms, do you?
I suspect this book gets mentioned so much because it's a very good book -- it reminds me of a software companion to Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ (which is another fine book if you haven't read it) and gives us the story behind NT development much better than this article did.
It's normal practice to keep 'marketing' names, branding information etc in resource files, which can be searched and edited separately from the code. However, searching within the resource files for *bitmaps* which have version names within them (e.g. the Help|About box in Win2000/XP) is slightly more difficult -- especially if some cretin had not labeled the graphic resource properly. I'd suspect that bitmaps would have taken most of the time, and that the devs who fixed this probably ran macros inside their resource editor (which has a fairly neat macro system based on VBA actually).
Slashdot Mirror
It takes more to market software than it does to write it. Obviously, this may not be true for items sold on shareware chennels, but it is otherwise mostly true.
:-p). This skeleton crew would ensure that AOL's long term interests are broadly met by the moz.org crew.
So -- running those servers doesn't cost AOL much. (They could put it on ATDN.) A skeleton staff of developers and QA doesn't cost much either (and hey, they could always offshore it
On the other hand, AOL would save money is by choosing not to release commercial, AOL/Netscape branded browsers based on Gecko. It would save money in not marketing and promoting it. It would even save money on documentation, evangelisation and user support. This would give MS a reason to stay honest, because AOL would still have the flexibility of hiking their commitment to moz the moment they felt MS started playing dirty. AOL gets max. ROI on min. investment.
> This comment is either naive, sarcastic, paid-for or just plain really stupid.
And the parent comment was written by the bastard child of the goatse.cx man. Do you want to get into a name-calling match, or do you want constructive debate? Oh wait, this is an AC. On Slashdot.
> If AOL is prudent, it will pray for peace and prepare for war.
Which is why I said, the best that may happen is that AOL will keep a meaningful developer presence in mozilla.org as a sort of long term insurance against any "funny stuff" from MS, and to ensure that their interests are taken care of by the OSS community. At the same time, they'll look to cutting cost by not committing to releasing an AOL/Netscape branded browser. I simply cannot see AOL releasing Netscape versions for the next seven years unless its financial health improves dramatically.
What I meant was Seamonkey will die a double death: moz.org is moving away from it, and I expect AOL to stop shipping it too, within the year. When Firebird v1.0 ships, with AOL support or without, it will be extremely unlikely that AOL will release a Netscape-branded version of Firebird.
Anyway, I don't think anyone here will mourn the death of the commercial Netscape distribution, although as one AC in this thread pointed out, Netscape's engineers did play a decent role in getting bugs fixed in the browser.
> Phoenix?
LOL! incidentally, the post you replied to was posted using Phoenix 0.5 (haven't gotten around moving to 0.6 yet)
But I wonder -- with AOL and MS moving towards IE, and the commercial Netscape vanishing, *and* old Netscape diehards (like Citibank) gradually coming around to the IE path, what's to stop web developers (who are lazy anyway) from creating sites that "work only with IE"?
I fear that by the time Firebird v1.0 comes around, IE will be so entrenched with commercial sites that most users will not see it worth the hassle to switch to something else.
I may be being extremely stupid here, but why would they use IE over Gecko. No compliance and the posibility of restrictions vs. W3C compliance and nice shiny open sourceness. The choice seems obvious to me
Ah, the naïvete of the young. Imagine me, a old curmudgeon at AOLTW, sitting in my office and wondering how the stock has tanked.
I get a $750M cash offer, which is very pleasant to have. Promises of cooperation. Whispers of "you won't have pay all those Netscape engineers and QA any more, our IE team will work with you to integrate mshtml into AOL".
I see prospects of not paying lawyers. I see not fighting one of the world's most cash-rich companies in a draining legal battle that analysts give me hell about in each earnings call. I see some prospect of working together instead of slugging it out.
I hear how 95% of the web already uses IE. And how MS is 'committed' to making the best better with time*.
And the choice seems pretty obvious to me.
* btw: MS's PDC conference in october is supposed to have some pretty neat news about the next version of IE. Expect UI tweaks (popup blocking at least, not sure about tabs), managed code and a significantly better security model.
> Mozilla's not going anywhere.
Yes, mozilla.org won't go away, but the commercial Netscape browser -- that could well die (and a good thing too, it was a pig, with AOL adding over 20MB of its own junk)
The best that may happen is that AOL will keep a meaningful developer presence in mozilla.org as a sort of long term insurance against any "funny stuff" from MS, and to ensure that their interests are taken care of by the OSS community -- but don't bet on it happening.
The commercial Netscape browser (Seamonkey) will almost certainly stop being pushed real soon now (which in a way is convenient because Moz fans should switch to Firebird anyway) I honestly can't see a cash-strapped AOL paying for Netscape engineers and QA to continue working on Seamonkey -- especially if MS plays nice (and MS has no reasons to *not* play nice, their antitrust battles are dying down one by one.)
> For maximum results, try 'bitch'.
Yes, Hey, ho, on your way out, take out the garbage doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
And I agree with you -- the folk who let Gator get installed *are* often lazy and indifferent. But that does not excuse what Gator does -- it remains a cheap, underhanded thing to do.
Finally, I think it is inappropriate to classify Gator as "spyware" any longer. I challenge anyone to find an instance where Gator installs itself surreptitiously on a users browser any longer.
Then why do I still see Gator being delivered to end-users via drive-by downloads, then? Granted, they clicked yes on a freaking dialog, but if you polled users, you'd find the vast majority of them did so by mistake.
That makes Gator a petty little company increasing its userbase by taking advantage of user ignorance, in my book.
> cheap imitation
Um, in the same way that Java is a 'cheap' Smalltalk knock-off? Next you'll be telling me that Sun invented the virtual machine, byte-code, OO, and OO APIs.
Both Java and C# are OO-lite languages ("blue-collar", as Gosling calls them) designed for rapid, uncomplicated OO development -- nothing wrong, as long as you realize languages are just tools.
And oh, those who write c-sharp as seahash are about as pathetic as the ones who write windoze instead of windows. Wish people learnt that no one gives a flying fuck about their oh-so-cute name for MS' "illegitimate child".
Seriously, the guys in India, Russia, et. al. are working their asses off for far less money than IT professionals make here. Do you think they are spending their time wondering how to goof off?
The oddest thing is, most IT managers in India don't consider reading Slashdot == goofing off (guess they just read it for the news). A lot of them actually considering a decent site for tech news, even if somewhat speculative (ahem!)
> Please don't compare reasonable software, such as ... Sun's Common Desktop Environemnt
... *gasp* *wheeze *choke* Have you actually ever *used* CDE? Reasonable, my left foot... :-D
Ha ha ha
Slightly offtopic, but interesting: The Trouble with Indian Names.
Well, from the correct Indian pronunciation:
Shiv-uh (Siv-uh is fine too)
VYE-Duh-NAT-hun
Vaidya means 'physician' in Sanskrit, FWIW.
Yawn. ACs are not worth replying to, but still.
Go see allegedly high-born castes ("Brahmins") pull rickshaws (human-powered carts) in Patna.
Go see Rajasthani Meenas (a "low-born" caste, under-developed until a few decades ago) get into the India's Civil Service and get cushy jobs in ever increasing numbers (affirmative action has helped somewhat here).
Look at the politics and bureaucracy of almost any South Indian state (especially Tamil Nadu) and see how Brahmins have practically been eliminated from both these spheres.
Look at how powerful the so-called lower-castes and tribals are in the north, in UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.
Sure, caste isn't finished in India (it has had 2500 years to flourish here, after all) but things are a lot better now for 'low-born' Indians today. And that is a Good Thing(tm).
Today, how successful you are is usually decided by how well educated you are. And that's the way things should be. And thanks to affirmative action, there are *lots* of "low-born" Indians who get excellent education, 'reserved' seats in the best colleges and free/highly subsidized education, even in college and grad school.
... and INR is how the Indian Rupee is written formally (e.g. in financial transactions) where you don't want to confuse it with the Indonesian Rupiah, the Pakistani Rupee, the Nepali Rupee, etc.
But yes, in informal usage "Rs" is used exclusively.
Considering this service has just started, that too as a pilot project (available initially in one exchange per city), I'd have to say that your `punjab' friend was talking through his turban. :)
Calcutta (Kolkata) is actually one of the poorest metropolises in India, and it has one of the lowest costs of living in urban India. On the other hand, that minimum wage of Rs 2000 is for unskilled workers. For a person with a engineering degree, 5000-6000 would be a more realistic minimum wage .
840 is dinner for 4 people at Peter Cat, an upscale, trendy, expensive restaurant (where someone bought me dinner), and the guy buying dinner winced when he saw the bill (a local physician).
I've been to Peter Cat before, and I'll say this: it's great, but compared with upscale restaurants throughout the country, it's cheap. Dinner for two at a similar place in Madras can easily set you back Rs 1000, and Bombay and Delhi are even more expensive.
So? What makes Saddam so special?
;-)
/. journal and let people respond to that. Responding to ACs is not quite worth it.
What makes Saddam (and the rulers in Syria, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, the wahhabis in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the lunatics in N.Korea) `special' is that they routinely export terror into countries that have no way of striking back ("asymmetrical warfare") because there is no formal declaration of war, and all the other formal things that real countries fighting real wars do.
Saddam's ties with weapons suppliers in the middle-east (through Syria mostly) is well-known, and more information will emerge in the days to come.
Usually, the countries that suffer are (surprise!) the two non-Islamic democracies that border West and East of the middle-east: Israel and India (although the former Soviet republics, and even China, can tell you how charming Islamic terrorists can be). The US has only been a very recent target of these groups, but the US' ability to retaliate is on a far higher level that most of the other targets.
There are plenty of regimes that do the same, but I don't see thousands of troops pouring into those countries, do you?
Hey, we've just gotten started!
Its O.K, you can ignore me. After all, you're morally superiour (Sounds familiar...Heil!), arn't you?
Never said I was `morally superiour' [sic], so stop putting *your* words into *my* mouth. And FYI, I don't think my value system, religion, etc., is `superior', it's merely the case that I object to being shot at/bombed by a suicide bomber when I'm on my way to work/at a deli/in the subway. I have a selfish interest in not ending up dead.
OTOH, you *could* be ignored because you choose to not stand behind your words, instead you post anonymously. You needn't give your email address away, open a
Here's another one: "Saddam Hussein is a murdering louse who has raped Iraq for too long."
Or how about, "Saddam Hussein leads a regime which openly advocates suicide bombings, killing civilians and violating the laws of war, including the white flag of truce; and has `rogue regime' written all over it."
On a somewhat related note, now that Moz1.3 is out, when is Galeon 2 expected? I look forward to browsing the web on a pureblooded Gnome 2 app :-)
I get uptimes of 20-30 days on my Windows 2000 box (512MB RAM) without logging out, which i use as a workstation (usually 10-20 IE/Phoenix/Opera windows open + VS.net + at least 2-3 Office XP tasks, plus 3 messengers + pageant + antivirus + Winamp2 + Outlook XP. I'd get more but I run Windows Update every ~20-30 days for the security updates (which ask me to reboot).
Only bug I've noticed is that explorer.exe sometimes fouls up its icon cache every 14 days or so, though restarting explorer.exe via the Task Manager solves that problem.
This is much better than my experience of X sessions on Linux that'd force me to exit X once in 3-7 days or so (I'd love to know what uptimes other get with X -- am I doing something wrong? (Redhat 7.1 on a (dualbooting) Dell Optiplex)).
I'd just like to add -- make no mistake, Windows 2000 (and XP, though I don't like its default looks -- you can make it look it Win98 if you want though) line is *great* as a graphic workstation. When you consider that Win2k SP3 added a great compatibility layer (WinXP has a better one though) then Win2K looks sweeter than OSX because of broader app availability.
You don't say someone is spamming TAOCP when he recommends a good book on data structures/algorithms, do you?
I suspect this book gets mentioned so much because it's a very good book -- it reminds me of a software companion to Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ (which is another fine book if you haven't read it) and gives us the story behind NT development much better than this article did.
> Ahh, good ol' sed
It's normal practice to keep 'marketing' names, branding information etc in resource files, which can be searched and edited separately from the code. However, searching within the resource files for *bitmaps* which have version names within them (e.g. the Help|About box in Win2000/XP) is slightly more difficult -- especially if some cretin had not labeled the graphic resource properly. I'd suspect that bitmaps would have taken most of the time, and that the devs who fixed this probably ran macros inside their resource editor (which has a fairly neat macro system based on VBA actually).
> what's up with all the hot women on the peppercoin page?
:-p)
What's wrong with using pics of hot women to sell your stuff? (Unless you're gay
Seriously, I think their website designer ran out of ideas and decided to use some 'default' eye candy.