Now the Mozilla Foundation owns firefox.com and getfirefox.com. The former just has a small message and a link to getfirefox.com and mozilla.org. getfirefox.com itself simply redirects to the firefox page at mozilla.org. I think we can seriously expect some serious stuff go up on these two URLs when Firefox 1.0 actually comes out.
Certainly. I too expected another one of those FUD-filled articles, but this one is fairly mature and balanced. I don't agree with all of it, but such articles should always be welcomed.
FIRSTLY, everyone posting here should understand that arguments about open source security issues being addressed faster don't apply here. RTFA! He is talking about writing quality and secure code that has fewer bugs, not about responses to bug discoveries.
Despite the title of the article, what he is saying is that being open source and exposed to lots of eyeballs doesn't automatically make a piece of software secure. High eyeball exposure isn't a substitute for well written, and well audited code. Looking for tougher, more subtle bugs is a matter of paying very special attention.
Reading through thousands of lines of someone else's badly written and poorly documented code looking for subte vulnarabilties isn't the most rewarding or exiting job on earth. Such a job is best given to someone with a good, steady salary (as the article validly points out). And yes, a coder from big corporation like IBM will do (plently of incentive for IBM). To quote:
...the open source world needs to recognize the importance of independent, third-party auditing. The community needs to develop security auditing expertise that it applies to projects, particularly as better automation and educational material become available. The community should be on the lookout for creative arrangements to persuade the industry to pay for independent security audits and certifications, as such matters are highly likely to grow in importance and are unlikely to be free.
He is not saying that proprietary code is more secure than open source. He is only saying that open source faces very similar issues, and lots and lots of eyeballs alone will not address the issue.
Its a fairly unbiased article, and far from being a troll. Give it a read. If slashdot's moderation system extended that far, I would personally give it a +1, Interesting. He is giving some constructive feedback.
And he concludes the article with some insight:
In the end it doesn't matter if open source systems tend to be more secure than proprietary systems, because on the whole they aren't yet coming close to being "secure enough."
Read it folks, he's not being anti OSS. "Open Source Security: Still Some Way to Go" would have been a better title.
I agree with you, though i do still block some ads (from the more annoying ad hosting services).
Still, its worth pointing out that I have never found a commercial website talking about Firefox and its extensions ever mentioning anything about Adblock.
although they are not abandoning their closed source software like Zenworks, a strategye they call "shared source".
I believe the term Novell uses is "mixed source". They work on open source as well as proprietary.
"Shared source" is a term from Microsoft. They have a "shared source" licensing program under which certain people can see the source code of some of their programs under certain restrictions.
A lot of the time, you can't reproduce them on a [faster|slower] connection, and if the developers aren't experiencing it, they're stuck
Precisely the case. From what I understand, it was caused by a race condition, a class of problems that popup when multiple threads (or processes) work in parallel on the same resources. Such bugs are very subtle and hard to reproduce, as they depend a lot on external conditions.
I used to get this problem at/. almost every time with a dialup connection, but I have never seen it happen here with my new connection. I still occasionally see it happen in other pages, only not so dramatically (usually just a line or two that bleeds).
Anyway, as long as you're having problems, the quick work around is to change the text size and back. Just hold Ctrl and scroll you mouse wheel once up, then once done, and its fixed.
Yes, it does look like it would be open-sourced as part of Solaris 10 (it was mentioned as one of the major new features).
Assuming the Solaris 10 will be true open source (not like Microsoft's "shared source"), as well as GPL compatibile, would I be able to use ZFS on my GNU/Linux desktop? Will ZFS be a viable alternative to ext3 and ReiserFS? Or is the overhead too big?
If I had mod points, i would have modded you down.
Sure, its been a while since the mozilla browser has been in development, but note that a good part of that time was spent perfecting the Gecko rendering engine, and making the Mozilla Suite (browser, mail client, html editor etc).
Firefox (initially Pheonix, then Firebird) has been in development only since last year (around May or June?). They basically started with the browser component of the Mozilla suite, and rewrote significant bits of the UI, and added plenty of new UI features (customizable toolbars, better bookmarks, better extension and theme management, etc.).
So Firefox-the-browser (minus Gecko) is still a bit of a baby, and has only just reached 1.0PR. You cannot seriosly expect extensions to work across pre-release versions when they are still adding features (new RSS/Atom feature in bookmarks, new find toolbar etc, all in this release) and refining the browser!
The browser is still in development and gaining new features, and I don't mind waiting a few days for extension authors to make (mostly minor, if any) changes to their extensions before upgrading.
A much better list of new features in this preview release can be found here. Nice screenshots included.
A more detailed list of changes can be found here.
Overall, I'm pretty excited that this new release actually has new features, and is not simply a more polished and stable 0.9. The new find toolbar will greatly improve the usability of type-ahead find, and the 'LiveBookmarks' feature is promising.
Also of note, there is a new 'Information Toolbar' that appears in the top area notifying the user if a popup has been blocked. It's an idea pinched from IE6 SP2, but a good one. It's also used to notify the user if an extension installation failed.
Having the adress bar get a padlock icon and turn yellow when on an encrypted site is also a welcome change. This kind of feature would hugely enhance the 'Secure Browser' image firefox is trying to sell.
Am I switching yet? No, I'm going to wait up to a few days till the extensions I use (adblock, dictionary search, image zoom and a few others) are updated. Can't wait
But seriosly, anyone else here feels real sad about this? Just seeing the wreckage of this fairly high tech thing lying in the desert sand. There were a lot of high hopes for this fairly interesting scientific experiment.
Forget the lost money -- the folks behind the probe at NASA must be feeling terrible seeing years of hard work lying broken and half buried in the sand.
Sure, this is a relatively small failure (compared to say, Columbia), but anything of this sort is sad.
On that note, the crashed probe looks very much like a UFO:)
I am currently counting down days till I receive one or more of these pics forwared as chain email that claims a UFO crashed in Utah/Arizona/Texas/Nevada, and the guys standing by the helicoptor are from NASA/The Pentagon/The CIA. The whole incident was covered up, and these photographs were leaked from a website/retrieved from the camera of a witness who later dissapeared.
Seriously, people have been fooled into believing that these stills from Armageddon are actually pictures of Space Shuttle Columbia blowing up.
I'm not 100% sure, but The Sims 2 was supposed to be released on 14th February 2004, but it was initially postponed to March 14th. Then it was further postponed to around July, then finally to September.
Some info here: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/thesims 2/news_ 6087079.html http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/ thesims2/news_ 6097684.html
Making the IE icon launch an alternate browser may or may not be a good idea depending on your situation. It is obviosly a bad idea if you're actually trying to fool the user into thinking that they are still using IE, rather than teaching them that they must use the other browser.
However, swapping icons can be very usefull if the user knows what is going on. The reason? People get used to clicking on certain icons for certain taks.
I realised the extent to which this was important recently, when I switched from using Mozilla 1.7x (I had been using the suite's browser as my primary browser for for about 2 years) to Firefox 0.9x on my PC. For a period of time I had both, the Mozilla and the Firefox icons on my desktop (I was still testing if Firefox was good enough for me). The trouble was that out of sheer habit I would always click on the Mozilla icon instead of the Firefox icon. I tried removing the Mozilla icon all together, but I had myself searching for for it for a few seconds every time I wanted to go on the web, completely ignoring the Firefox icon. Finally, out of frustration I ended up making the Mozilla icon launch Firefox.
By the way, the XPlanet project (xplanet.sf.net) can use images like this for the night-side rendering of a near-realtime Earth on your desktop.
Another great program for rendering images of the earth, the solar sytem, and parts of our galaxy is Celestia. It's GPL'd, and runs under most of your favorite platforms. Very addictive.
Another reason why targeting brown-skinned people won't work: Not all brown-skinned people are muslims. Thousands of travelers from India are inconvinienced at US airports every day.
GAMEPLAY is the real core of a game. The graphics are just icing.
That's a popular myth. Agreed, great graphics is not substitute for great gameplay, but advances in graphics if used effectively can greatly change the nature of the game. Making a game look and feel more real is especially important for 3D shooters.
Here are a few instances where improvements in lighting can have a significant effect on the way Counter-Strike would be played.
-You see realistic muzzle flashes that light up the surroundings. The position of an enemy firing around the corner is given away.
-You see shadows of other players. Many a player's position will be given away by the shadows they cast.
-Dark or poorly lit areas have different strategic significance. For example, a camper's position is given away when momentarily illuminated by the flash of a firing weapon, or a distant frag grenade.
Physics is another area, and the articles have already highlighted their importance.
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Yes this should have got more coverage.
Now the Mozilla Foundation owns firefox.com and getfirefox.com. The former just has a small message and a link to getfirefox.com and mozilla.org. getfirefox.com itself simply redirects to the firefox page at mozilla.org. I think we can seriously expect some serious stuff go up on these two URLs when Firefox 1.0 actually comes out.
FIRSTLY, everyone posting here should understand that arguments about open source security issues being addressed faster don't apply here. RTFA! He is talking about writing quality and secure code that has fewer bugs, not about responses to bug discoveries.
Despite the title of the article, what he is saying is that being open source and exposed to lots of eyeballs doesn't automatically make a piece of software secure. High eyeball exposure isn't a substitute for well written, and well audited code. Looking for tougher, more subtle bugs is a matter of paying very special attention.
Reading through thousands of lines of someone else's badly written and poorly documented code looking for subte vulnarabilties isn't the most rewarding or exiting job on earth. Such a job is best given to someone with a good, steady salary (as the article validly points out). And yes, a coder from big corporation like IBM will do (plently of incentive for IBM). To quote:
He is not saying that proprietary code is more secure than open source. He is only saying that open source faces very similar issues, and lots and lots of eyeballs alone will not address the issue.
Its a fairly unbiased article, and far from being a troll. Give it a read. If slashdot's moderation system extended that far, I would personally give it a +1, Interesting. He is giving some constructive feedback.
And he concludes the article with some insight:
Read it folks, he's not being anti OSS. "Open Source Security: Still Some Way to Go" would have been a better title.
--balster neb
I agree with you, though i do still block some ads (from the more annoying ad hosting services).
Still, its worth pointing out that I have never found a commercial website talking about Firefox and its extensions ever mentioning anything about Adblock.
although they are not abandoning their closed source software like Zenworks, a strategye they call "shared source".
I believe the term Novell uses is "mixed source". They work on open source as well as proprietary.
"Shared source" is a term from Microsoft. They have a "shared source" licensing program under which certain people can see the source code of some of their programs under certain restrictions.
A lot of the time, you can't reproduce them on a [faster|slower] connection, and if the developers aren't experiencing it, they're stuck
/. almost every time with a dialup connection, but I have never seen it happen here with my new connection. I still occasionally see it happen in other pages, only not so dramatically (usually just a line or two that bleeds).
Precisely the case. From what I understand, it was caused by a race condition, a class of problems that popup when multiple threads (or processes) work in parallel on the same resources. Such bugs are very subtle and hard to reproduce, as they depend a lot on external conditions.
I used to get this problem at
Anyway, as long as you're having problems, the quick work around is to change the text size and back. Just hold Ctrl and scroll you mouse wheel once up, then once done, and its fixed.
Yes, it does look like it would be open-sourced as part of Solaris 10 (it was mentioned as one of the major new features).
Assuming the Solaris 10 will be true open source (not like Microsoft's "shared source"), as well as GPL compatibile, would I be able to use ZFS on my GNU/Linux desktop? Will ZFS be a viable alternative to ext3 and ReiserFS? Or is the overhead too big?
This AC explains what the policy is for extension compatibility across point releases.
Can't expect say, a bookmarks-related extension to work in a new version that has several new bookmark features, can you?
If I had mod points, i would have modded you down.
Sure, its been a while since the mozilla browser has been in development, but note that a good part of that time was spent perfecting the Gecko rendering engine, and making the Mozilla Suite (browser, mail client, html editor etc).
Firefox (initially Pheonix, then Firebird) has been in development only since last year (around May or June?). They basically started with the browser component of the Mozilla suite, and rewrote significant bits of the UI, and added plenty of new UI features (customizable toolbars, better bookmarks, better extension and theme management, etc.).
So Firefox-the-browser (minus Gecko) is still a bit of a baby, and has only just reached 1.0PR. You cannot seriosly expect extensions to work across pre-release versions when they are still adding features (new RSS/Atom feature in bookmarks, new find toolbar etc, all in this release) and refining the browser!
The browser is still in development and gaining new features, and I don't mind waiting a few days for extension authors to make (mostly minor, if any) changes to their extensions before upgrading.
A much better list of new features in this preview release can be found here. Nice screenshots included.
A more detailed list of changes can be found here.
Overall, I'm pretty excited that this new release actually has new features, and is not simply a more polished and stable 0.9. The new find toolbar will greatly improve the usability of type-ahead find, and the 'LiveBookmarks' feature is promising.
Also of note, there is a new 'Information Toolbar' that appears in the top area notifying the user if a popup has been blocked. It's an idea pinched from IE6 SP2, but a good one. It's also used to notify the user if an extension installation failed.
Having the adress bar get a padlock icon and turn yellow when on an encrypted site is also a welcome change. This kind of feature would hugely enhance the 'Secure Browser' image firefox is trying to sell.
Am I switching yet? No, I'm going to wait up to a few days till the extensions I use (adblock, dictionary search, image zoom and a few others) are updated. Can't wait
Hah, that's nothing. Typing "shit", "cat vomit" or "brain damaging color scheme" always brings me here. :)
But seriosly, anyone else here feels real sad about this? Just seeing the wreckage of this fairly high tech thing lying in the desert sand. There were a lot of high hopes for this fairly interesting scientific experiment.
Forget the lost money -- the folks behind the probe at NASA must be feeling terrible seeing years of hard work lying broken and half buried in the sand.
Sure, this is a relatively small failure (compared to say, Columbia), but anything of this sort is sad.
On that note, the crashed probe looks very much like a UFO :)
I am currently counting down days till I receive one or more of these pics forwared as chain email that claims a UFO crashed in Utah/Arizona/Texas/Nevada, and the guys standing by the helicoptor are from NASA/The Pentagon/The CIA. The whole incident was covered up, and these photographs were leaked from a website/retrieved from the camera of a witness who later dissapeared.
Seriously, people have been fooled into believing that these stills from Armageddon are actually pictures of Space Shuttle Columbia blowing up.
Well, since you asked for it, here's a link to this article in the glorious cat vomit IT colour scheme :)
Its possible, and its been done. Its called MPEG.
Anyway, this may be of interest to you.
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
LOL, A set of 4 questions moderated as Informative -- Only on Slashdot!
Precisly this question was asked in an Ask Slashdot earlier this year.
The Sims was released on 14th February 2000 IIRC.
s 2/news_ 6087079.html/ thesims2/news_ 6097684.html
I'm not 100% sure, but The Sims 2 was supposed to be released on 14th February 2004, but it was initially postponed to March 14th. Then it was further postponed to around July, then finally to September.
Some info here:
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/thesim
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy
I'm going to show this post to everyone who calls me a freak for speaking Simlish.
Making the IE icon launch an alternate browser may or may not be a good idea depending on your situation. It is obviosly a bad idea if you're actually trying to fool the user into thinking that they are still using IE, rather than teaching them that they must use the other browser.
However, swapping icons can be very usefull if the user knows what is going on. The reason? People get used to clicking on certain icons for certain taks.
I realised the extent to which this was important recently, when I switched from using Mozilla 1.7x (I had been using the suite's browser as my primary browser for for about 2 years) to Firefox 0.9x on my PC. For a period of time I had both, the Mozilla and the Firefox icons on my desktop (I was still testing if Firefox was good enough for me). The trouble was that out of sheer habit I would always click on the Mozilla icon instead of the Firefox icon. I tried removing the Mozilla icon all together, but I had myself searching for for it for a few seconds every time I wanted to go on the web, completely ignoring the Firefox icon. Finally, out of frustration I ended up making the Mozilla icon launch Firefox.
I had it like that for a few weeks.
By the way, the XPlanet project (xplanet.sf.net) can use images like this for the night-side rendering of a near-realtime Earth on your desktop.
Another great program for rendering images of the earth, the solar sytem, and parts of our galaxy is Celestia. It's GPL'd, and runs under most of your favorite platforms. Very addictive.
Another reason why targeting brown-skinned people won't work: Not all brown-skinned people are muslims. Thousands of travelers from India are inconvinienced at US airports every day.
GAMEPLAY is the real core of a game. The graphics are just icing.
That's a popular myth. Agreed, great graphics is not substitute for great gameplay, but advances in graphics if used effectively can greatly change the nature of the game. Making a game look and feel more real is especially important for 3D shooters.
Here are a few instances where improvements in lighting can have a significant effect on the way Counter-Strike would be played.
-You see realistic muzzle flashes that light up the surroundings. The position of an enemy firing around the corner is given away.
-You see shadows of other players. Many a player's position will be given away by the shadows they cast.
-Dark or poorly lit areas have different strategic significance. For example, a camper's position is given away when momentarily illuminated by the flash of a firing weapon, or a distant frag grenade.
Physics is another area, and the articles have already highlighted their importance.
Yes, I can almost imagine that. Rover uncovers martian rock, and guess what's written on it?
First Post!
Ditto.
From TFA:
is mind uploading, in which characters create electronic copies of their brains on silicon.
Such 'predictions' are still around. The 2001: A Space Odyssey talks about listening to music recorded on spools of magnetic tape
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