but if history serves, it will be a minor spurt in advancement until Microsoft has re-landed their stranglehold on that segment of the market.... and I'm guessing that won't take very long.
Actually, the reason why IE has 90% of market share is not that Microsoft put it by default in windows. It helped, indeed, but there're proofs that netscape pretty much fucked it up. Basically, Netscape let them win without opposing resistance
Here's an interview from Arstechnica to Scott Collins, a programmer who was working at netscape back in the netscape 4.0 days:
Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past?
There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.a
Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name.
There's no safe browser? Wow, the next thing this guy will discover is that secure software doesn't exists and that all software has bugs. Welcome to the world of software development, dude.
AFAIK, Firefox has quite good security track and fixes things fast. That's what matters. Firefox is a "secure" browser by any measurements, and unlike other browsers, they deserve the reputation they have.
And one of the reasons why Firefox has security bugs is because it's a evolving product. Internet explorer however is a 3-years-old code base which has not changed almost nothing. Mozilla and firefox have been being updated for years to support modern standards etc, Internet explorer has done nothing.
(Actually, it's suprising that after so many time people still finds bugs in internet explorer. It shouldn't have so many bugs left - look at sendmail, bind etc, they're crappy software from a security POV, but their code base is _so_ old that it's very hard to find more security problems. Internet explorer must be really buggy to keep such bad security track)
Noticed how MSN messenger does exactly the same? - it always uses IE despite of having configured Firefox to be the contrary. For logitech it's probably an error. For messenger, I don't think so...
Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that have the free time on their hands to tinker with things that they find interesting.
The point of larry is that decent software can't be created by a student in a couple of weekends. It takes some programmers working full-time to create a "perfect" product - just look at the state of the "documentation" of most of software projects
However I think that lack of resources is not that bad, sometimes. Students who write software on weekends need to be smart because of the lack of resources. Sometimes this means that they need to write good software, design things properly, etc. Not by choice, but because they have not option.
Many people has forgotten the Unix example, Multics was a great OS founded by AT&T, MIT etc with docens of engineers, Unix was mostly a hack by a couple of guys. IMO Unix suceed not because they guys behing it was extremely smart (many of the ideas from unix were stolen from multics), but because they needed a good system and neccesity forced them to write a great OS. Millions of dollars don't always drive "innovation", innovation drives innovation; money is a way of encourage innovation but "neccesity", open source ideals, desire to punch Bitkeeper can create it to..
Because red hat is not just giving it for free - they've opensourced it. Under the GPL. This means it's really free, we can improve it, port to weird architectures, to freeBSD, etc. We can see the code, not just use it.
Re:I don't know what
on
Layoffs at OSDL
·
· Score: 4, Informative
OSDL - home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux - is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Founded in 2000 and supported by a global consortium of IT industry leaders, OSDL is a non-profit organization that provides state-of the-art computing and test facilities in the United States and Japan available to developers around the world. OSDL's founding members are IBM, HP, CA, Intel, and NEC. A complete list of OSDL member organizations is provided on the member page at OSDL Members.
Most of the spyware I've seen is legal. They just use tricks to make you agree ("press ok button to get pr0n videos" and then in a small box a contract or whatever saying "if you press ok you agree with...")
Lots of spyware is installed by installing programs that bundle spyware with them. Kazza, divx, etc. People just press "OK, OK, Next, OK" even in the license field. Cookies are used sometimes as a spyware too. This bill is not going to change anything for those.
Yeah, I'm sure apple is going to release a x86 apple computer. I mean, PowerPC is not in its best moment, after all xbox 2, PS3 etc are not carrying powerpc chips. Also, a new architecture would mean no binary program for mac os x would work in a x86 computer, 3rd party companies would love such movement.
Jobs would rather let apple die before selling a x86 mac
is Slashdot somehow suggesting that this is Microsoft's fault in some bizarre, convoluted way?
Indeed, I do at least. If Windows weren't a such crappy design, you could forbid to run such attachments. Because they inherited that thing from CP/M -> DOS -> Windows 95 and they were so stupid to not remove it in NT, they're suffering this now.
If I send a executable with linux and the mailer saves it, unless the mail is crappy it won't have +x permissions and won't work. Because of that, asking people to write "chmod...." in a command line makes it a bigger barrier than the "executability" of.exe files, which you can activate with something so stupid like a double click. I'm not suprised those things spread so quickly.
SGAE (equivalent of MPAA in spain, more or less) is a private company, but that doesn't stops them from using their power "if you don't want a visite from BSA to inspect all your software, I recommend you...") or things like that.
it's not talking about P2P. Jorge said he'd make a live demonstration of him getting a copyright-protected song from a P2P network in front of all the audience. Law in Spain allow you to do this for your personal use as long as you get no money from it. He challenged anyone to sue him - he knew he was doint nothing illegal. SGAE, like MPAA, don't like that kind of things.
Well, Microsoft at least it already has a aquivalent with a javascript RSS reader and everything, so Microsoft seems to be "ahead" in this case: http://www.start.com/1/
Re:Can Microsoft even legally sell Windows in Cuba
on
Cuba Switching to Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Even if they can, Cuba has loved linux for a while - obviously, even if they can they don't want to depend from USA technology. Infomed, for one (the national healtcare information sharing or whatever you english people call it) is based in linux at least
Firefox extensions look to me somewhat similar to unix commands, ie: "don't define policy".
Instead of a big browser which does many things, build a browser with an extense API, every function of that API does one thing, and only one thing, and does it well. How you combine them is up to your imagination, just like it's up to your imagination how to combine grep, cat, sed etc.
They move most of the "policy" completely to the extensions, and they can compete with other browser by modifying the extensions the defaults browser has. IMO it's brilliant.
While it's a stupidity, it shows how today's technology is far behind of people's needs. Email is about sending things, and there is nothing conceptually wrong in wanting to send a 50 MB file if that's what you want to send. In my opinion, "mail servers" should only be used when the receiver is disconnected. If he's connected why don't send the video directly to him instead of going through a server?
Hell, the way you're dressed right now is based on U.S. popular culture.
And the way US citiziens dress was previously based in the European culture. Hell, they whole US culture is based in the European culture - that's from where most of american people comes, remember?
I listen to flamenco and classic music and that is not based in american culture by the way.
Its message passing is very lightweight, and the resulting performance is far better than Linux.
Faster than passing arguments in the stack? Oh wait, we have an option to pass arguments in registers in linux 2.6. Is QNX message passing faster than passing arguments in registers? Somehow, I doubt it...
What about apt? apt-proxy? apt torrent, if you don't want to hammer your servers?
Seriously, why would anyone *doubt* that delivering software is much better than linux? If there's something wrong in windows, is software packaging and delivery. Did you realized how you 3rd party programs don't have methods to update automatically? (hell, lots of programs even need to be uninstalled by hand before installing the new version, no "upgrade" support)
In Linux, you have things like APT. With APT, you can update ALL your software, not just the a few Microsoft apps. You can configure it like tou want, adding several lines from different servers in your sources.list, setting priorities in apt.conf, use P2P to automate it with a cron job. We are years ahead of Microsoft in this are, IMNSHO.
"Just because you can "load modules" doesn't mean you are suddenly a microkernel. God it's like monolithic has become a swear word, it's a perfectly valid design."
Indeed. Just like a microkernel doesn't makes it suddenly "a better design". It's perfectly possible to write a microkernel with a ugly design (And mach is a good example of a _bad_ design, there're reasons why Hurd developers are going for L4). And that's because "design" has nothing to see with message passing or monolithic - it's perfectly possible to write a monolithic kernel with a wonderful design and very mainteinable. Message passing just encourages it. And give that mac os x is not a microkernel - they moved lots of things to kernel space because of performance, hence they're not a microkernel - linux and mac os x are not really that different.
I don't understand why everybody says mac os x is a microkernel - it is not a microkernel. A microkernel most of the thigns in userspace. Mac os x moved _lots_ of things to kernelspace to save performance costs
Hence, Mac os x is not a microkernel. They started from one - they are NOT one. It's not different than linux in that HFS or a driver can hang your box if there's a bug somewhere. It's no different than linux in that they're well-layered. They're not really THAT different, really - and NT is not really different either. I mean, those things have been studied, there's no "hidden magic".
Maybe some people consider the mac os approach cleaner, personally I don't. If you're going to do a real microkernel, implemente everything in userspace and use message passing, do it. However if you're not going to do a real microkernel, why do you start from one and keep the message passing? May be some people find it "clean"...but message passing was done to write real microkernels, there's not need of it in a kernel that has lots of things in kernelspace like mac os x does. Do it the linux way - cheaper, simpler, less complexity....(this is why linus hates mac os x, they use microkernel funcionality to implement something that ends up being like traditional microkernels - lots of things in kernel userspace - so why not do it more KISS and kill message passing completely like linux does? You can do a good design anyway, design is not tyied to use messages or not)
Which points out how insecure is IE in windows 98/Me and why you should switch!
If Microsoft would care about windows 98 users, they'd have backported some of the XP SP2 features (say, the popup blocker) to windows 98.
Of course they haven't done that (they need to encourage people to switch to SP2 and sell more SP2 licenses). Firefox is the best option for windows 98 users (and they still make 20-30% of the internet population), IE has no place for a windows 98 internet users. In XP maybe, but definitively not in windows 98.
Corporate America is really too entrenched in Windows at the moment. I'm not talking about small to medium enterprises, I'm talking about Fortune 500. And everybody still needs to do business with them.
Fortune 500 companies are hardly pure-windows-users. Such huge companies use lots of operative systems, and I bet my ass that linux is already in several places of the offices of all them
Slashdot Mirror
but if history serves, it will be a minor spurt in advancement until Microsoft has re-landed their stranglehold on that segment of the market.... and I'm guessing that won't take very long.
Actually, the reason why IE has 90% of market share is not that Microsoft put it by default in windows. It helped, indeed, but there're proofs that netscape pretty much fucked it up. Basically, Netscape let them win without opposing resistance
Here's an interview from Arstechnica to Scott Collins, a programmer who was working at netscape back in the netscape 4.0 days:
Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past?
There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.a
Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name.
There's no safe browser? Wow, the next thing this guy will discover is that secure software doesn't exists and that all software has bugs. Welcome to the world of software development, dude.
AFAIK, Firefox has quite good security track and fixes things fast. That's what matters. Firefox is a "secure" browser by any measurements, and unlike other browsers, they deserve the reputation they have.
And one of the reasons why Firefox has security bugs is because it's a evolving product. Internet explorer however is a 3-years-old code base which has not changed almost nothing. Mozilla and firefox have been being updated for years to support modern standards etc, Internet explorer has done nothing.
(Actually, it's suprising that after so many time people still finds bugs in internet explorer. It shouldn't have so many bugs left - look at sendmail, bind etc, they're crappy software from a security POV, but their code base is _so_ old that it's very hard to find more security problems. Internet explorer must be really buggy to keep such bad security track)
Noticed how MSN messenger does exactly the same? - it always uses IE despite of having configured Firefox to be the contrary. For logitech it's probably an error. For messenger, I don't think so...
Keep in mind that there are a lot of people out there that have the free time on their hands to tinker with things that they find interesting.
The point of larry is that decent software can't be created by a student in a couple of weekends. It takes some programmers working full-time to create a "perfect" product - just look at the state of the "documentation" of most of software projects
However I think that lack of resources is not that bad, sometimes. Students who write software on weekends need to be smart because of the lack of resources. Sometimes this means that they need to write good software, design things properly, etc. Not by choice, but because they have not option.
Many people has forgotten the Unix example, Multics was a great OS founded by AT&T, MIT etc with docens of engineers, Unix was mostly a hack by a couple of guys. IMO Unix suceed not because they guys behing it was extremely smart (many of the ideas from unix were stolen from multics), but because they needed a good system and neccesity forced them to write a great OS. Millions of dollars don't always drive "innovation", innovation drives innovation; money is a way of encourage innovation but "neccesity", open source ideals, desire to punch Bitkeeper can create it to..
So where is the other Netscape software?
It has took them 8 months to GPL it. I guess they've focused more in the netscape directory.
Because red hat is not just giving it for free - they've opensourced it. Under the GPL. This means it's really free, we can improve it, port to weird architectures, to freeBSD, etc. We can see the code, not just use it.
About Osdl
OSDL - home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux - is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Founded in 2000 and supported by a global consortium of IT industry leaders, OSDL is a non-profit organization that provides state-of the-art computing and test facilities in the United States and Japan available to developers around the world. OSDL's founding members are IBM, HP, CA, Intel, and NEC. A complete list of OSDL member organizations is provided on the member page at OSDL Members.
Most of the spyware I've seen is legal. They just use tricks to make you agree ("press ok button to get pr0n videos" and then in a small box a contract or whatever saying "if you press ok you agree with...")
Lots of spyware is installed by installing programs that bundle spyware with them. Kazza, divx, etc. People just press "OK, OK, Next, OK" even in the license field. Cookies are used sometimes as a spyware too. This bill is not going to change anything for those.
You already can use darwin (kernel, basic system utilities) in your x86.
Here's a link for x86 darwin - inside the apple site
Yeah, I'm sure apple is going to release a x86 apple computer. I mean, PowerPC is not in its best moment, after all xbox 2, PS3 etc are not carrying powerpc chips. Also, a new architecture would mean no binary program for mac os x would work in a x86 computer, 3rd party companies would love such movement.
Jobs would rather let apple die before selling a x86 mac
is Slashdot somehow suggesting that this is Microsoft's fault in some bizarre, convoluted way?
.exe files, which you can activate with something so stupid like a double click. I'm not suprised those things spread so quickly.
Indeed, I do at least. If Windows weren't a such crappy design, you could forbid to run such attachments. Because they inherited that thing from CP/M -> DOS -> Windows 95 and they were so stupid to not remove it in NT, they're suffering this now.
If I send a executable with linux and the mailer saves it, unless the mail is crappy it won't have +x permissions and won't work. Because of that, asking people to write "chmod...." in a command line makes it a bigger barrier than the "executability" of
SGAE (equivalent of MPAA in spain, more or less) is a private company, but that doesn't stops them from using their power "if you don't want a visite from BSA to inspect all your software, I recommend you ...") or things like that.
it's not talking about P2P. Jorge said he'd make a live demonstration of him getting a copyright-protected song from a P2P network in front of all the audience. Law in Spain allow you to do this for your personal use as long as you get no money from it. He challenged anyone to sue him - he knew he was doint nothing illegal. SGAE, like MPAA, don't like that kind of things.
Oh and http://www.start.com/2/default.aspx for the version 2, etc
Well, Microsoft at least it already has a aquivalent with a javascript RSS reader and everything, so Microsoft seems to be "ahead" in this case: http://www.start.com/1/
Even if they can, Cuba has loved linux for a while - obviously, even if they can they don't want to depend from USA technology. Infomed, for one (the national healtcare information sharing or whatever you english people call it) is based in linux at least
Firefox extensions look to me somewhat similar to unix commands, ie: "don't define policy".
Instead of a big browser which does many things, build a browser with an extense API, every function of that API does one thing, and only one thing, and does it well. How you combine them is up to your imagination, just like it's up to your imagination how to combine grep, cat, sed etc.
They move most of the "policy" completely to the extensions, and they can compete with other browser by modifying the extensions the defaults browser has. IMO it's brilliant.
While it's a stupidity, it shows how today's technology is far behind of people's needs. Email is about sending things, and there is nothing conceptually wrong in wanting to send a 50 MB file if that's what you want to send. In my opinion, "mail servers" should only be used when the receiver is disconnected. If he's connected why don't send the video directly to him instead of going through a server?
Hell, the way you're dressed right now is based on U.S. popular culture.
And the way US citiziens dress was previously based in the European culture. Hell, they whole US culture is based in the European culture - that's from where most of american people comes, remember?
I listen to flamenco and classic music and that is not based in american culture by the way.
Its message passing is very lightweight, and the resulting performance is far better than Linux.
Faster than passing arguments in the stack? Oh wait, we have an option to pass arguments in registers in linux 2.6. Is QNX message passing faster than passing arguments in registers? Somehow, I doubt it...
What about apt? apt-proxy? apt torrent, if you don't want to hammer your servers?
Seriously, why would anyone *doubt* that delivering software is much better than linux? If there's something wrong in windows, is software packaging and delivery. Did you realized how you 3rd party programs don't have methods to update automatically? (hell, lots of programs even need to be uninstalled by hand before installing the new version, no "upgrade" support)
In Linux, you have things like APT. With APT, you can update ALL your software, not just the a few Microsoft apps. You can configure it like tou want, adding several lines from different servers in your sources.list, setting priorities in apt.conf, use P2P to automate it with a cron job. We are years ahead of Microsoft in this are, IMNSHO.
"Just because you can "load modules" doesn't mean you are suddenly a microkernel. God it's like monolithic has become a swear word, it's a perfectly valid design."
Indeed. Just like a microkernel doesn't makes it suddenly "a better design". It's perfectly possible to write a microkernel with a ugly design (And mach is a good example of a _bad_ design, there're reasons why Hurd developers are going for L4). And that's because "design" has nothing to see with message passing or monolithic - it's perfectly possible to write a monolithic kernel with a wonderful design and very mainteinable. Message passing just encourages it. And give that mac os x is not a microkernel - they moved lots of things to kernel space because of performance, hence they're not a microkernel - linux and mac os x are not really that different.
I don't understand why everybody says mac os x is a microkernel - it is not a microkernel. A microkernel most of the thigns in userspace. Mac os x moved _lots_ of things to kernelspace to save performance costs
Hence, Mac os x is not a microkernel. They started from one - they are NOT one. It's not different than linux in that HFS or a driver can hang your box if there's a bug somewhere. It's no different than linux in that they're well-layered. They're not really THAT different, really - and NT is not really different either. I mean, those things have been studied, there's no "hidden magic".
Maybe some people consider the mac os approach cleaner, personally I don't. If you're going to do a real microkernel, implemente everything in userspace and use message passing, do it. However if you're not going to do a real microkernel, why do you start from one and keep the message passing? May be some people find it "clean"...but message passing was done to write real microkernels, there's not need of it in a kernel that has lots of things in kernelspace like mac os x does. Do it the linux way - cheaper, simpler, less complexity....(this is why linus hates mac os x, they use microkernel funcionality to implement something that ends up being like traditional microkernels - lots of things in kernel userspace - so why not do it more KISS and kill message passing completely like linux does? You can do a good design anyway, design is not tyied to use messages or not)
(Of course, both ways work)
Which points out how insecure is IE in windows 98/Me and why you should switch!
If Microsoft would care about windows 98 users, they'd have backported some of the XP SP2 features (say, the popup blocker) to windows 98.
Of course they haven't done that (they need to encourage people to switch to SP2 and sell more SP2 licenses). Firefox is the best option for windows 98 users (and they still make 20-30% of the internet population), IE has no place for a windows 98 internet users. In XP maybe, but definitively not in windows 98.
Hi, Ali Akcaagac. GoneME didn't work out, right?
Corporate America is really too entrenched in Windows at the moment. I'm not talking about small to medium enterprises, I'm talking about Fortune 500. And everybody still needs to do business with them.
Fortune 500 companies are hardly pure-windows-users. Such huge companies use lots of operative systems, and I bet my ass that linux is already in several places of the offices of all them