In order to code Firefox in the supposedly fast C++ language,
Consider that the alternatives basically sucked when Netscape 4 was out. I guess they could've done Java, but I don't think Java was even JIT'ed, then.
they moved most of the key functionality into glacially slow JavaScript and XML.
Well, they do sort of want their JavaScript and XML to be fast for the web, so this could be seen as a way of eating their own dogfood.
In any case, I'm guessing JavaScript isn't a really limiting factor here. It's actually a decent language, and there have been problems to (for example) compile JavaScript into Java bytecode.
Either, the new JavaScript and its JIT will simply fix the problem with a minimum of hassle, or Firefox needs to be replaced by something that embeds Gecko in a Mono/.NET runtime and otherwise uses a GUI based on Gtk+ and a Javascript implementation based on the CLR.
Sounds like close to what I'd do, except Gtk+ is probably not such a good idea (not for cross-platform, anyway). I'm also not sure if I'd want to keep Gecko. But it will be a few months before I start this project, if ever.
So let's all call it "copyright infringement". Oh, wait the discussion suddenly didn't get better.
Maybe not. But "stealing" does have a different connotation. When people say "You stole my stuff!" it's possible for John Q. Public to have a knee-jerk reaction. If people say "You infringed my copyright!" then you actually have to think about it.
RMS may be precise, but he's also immune to being BSd too.
True enough, but that isn't the quality of RMS that I'm encouraging here. In fact, I don't agree at all with his demand that we call it "GNU/Linux". But the "free vs freedom vs open source" distinction is important, and not something you want people to be confused about. And certainly, the BSD people wouldn't want you to confuse BSD'd stuff with GPL'd stuff.
Put very, very simply: Copyright infringement is still wrong, but it's not as bad as theft. Free software is generally still "free as in beer", but it's generally better quality than freeware.
And what is even the more gailing is that you all treat your audiance like they're a bunch of idiots who can't see through it all.
Most of them are. Try not to take it so personally, especially if you're going to post as Anonymous Coward.
The IT folks are very much on the student's side here. Despite all the knee-jerk reactions here on Slashdot, illegitimate complaints simply don't get through - that's what a competent IT staff buys you. Of course, that much staff time on the student's behalf really does take money.
Good to hear. Now would you mind telling me why the burden of proof is on Stanford and the students, and not those filing the complaints?
One of those rules is to have the offending content removed, and to give up the name of the person who had control over that IP address at that time.
A takedown notice can do that? Without any proof?
Well, shit -- stalkers unite! Give me an IP address, I'll send a fake DMCA takedown notice to your ISP to get your name and address.
Also: Liable for what others do with their property? First, it's complete bullshit, otherwise I'd be seeing hundreds of people in court for their part in a botnet. They not only own the IP, but the hardware that sent me the Spam, or infected me, or whatever. Second... Where else is this true at all? If someone borrows or rents my car and uses it to kill someone, am I liable for homocide?
It's common knowledge that the best chance of having supported hardware in Linux is to use, at least, not brand new hardware
No, it's common knowledge that the best chance of having supported hardware in Linux is to check online to make sure it's supported. Just as you would with a Mac, or, back in the day, with Windows.
GIMP is not Photoshop, nor does it try to be -- the developers are very clear on that point.
Which is also not the point. You didn't ask for Photoshop, you asked for photo editing software. Linux is not Windows, either.
Gimp is also not the only game in town. There's also Krita and OpenOffice Draw. I doubt either is comparable, but I also doubt that most people who only need to do simple photo editing are going to miss the more advanced features from Gimp or Photoshop. People who need to do fairly advanced photo editing would also be the ones to benefit from any areas in which the gimp may be better than Photoshop -- I know there are people who prefer Gimp to Photoshop, although most of them were not raised on photoshop.
And just because it's available for Windows doesn't mean most people wouldn't be learning new software.
No, but it does mean you can ease them in. Get them using the Gimp on Windows, and you save yourself quite a bit of upgrade cost, and maybe over a year or two, slowly replace most of their software with opensource equivalents. Then, the switch to Linux should be much more painless.
OpenOffice is a poor substitute for Office. It may have a low learning curve, but it also gets low marks for functionality and compatibility, and stability.
Would you show me someone's opinion other than yours? Everyone I actually get to use OpenOffice sees it as a drop-in replacement for Office, except that they can't be bothered to have more than one office suite. The one drawback: OpenOffice is huge, and sucks up a huge chunk of RAM.
If you're willing to trade functionality for speed, there's also AbiWord, Gnumeric, and Koffice (split much more cleanly into components than OpenOffice).
I'm glad you're not my financial advisor. 25 years!?! That's a horrible rate of return.
25 years, and then it's solid, guaranteed profit. But I'm glad you're not my financial advisor, because I was using that as a starting point: If it costs $1k of your time, AND if you would have paid the absolute minimum in Windows upgrades, that's what you get.
But even if the return were 2 years, it's not worth the hassle.
Erm? I thought "the hassle" was exactly what I was counting in $1000 of your time.
Frankly, $550 amortized over, let's say only TWO years -- $225 per year -- is well worth having the support, compatibility, and features for most people.
I gladly give up commercial support, because I know I won't generally need support once I have a Linux box up and running. Compatibility is mostly there -- I have never had problems opening Office documents. And the features I gain with Linux (financial concerns being, honestly, somewhat small) are easily worth whatever features I lose from Windows.
Linux users are masochists. They generally ENJOY the pain of using Linux, and the satisfaction they get from finding their own solutions.
I must have been when I used Gentoo. Now I use Ubuntu, and I don't have to "find my own solution".
Let me put it this way: I just Googled for "Ubuntu DVD Playback", and the first result was ubuntuguide.org. Searched the page for DVD playback, and found four commands that I could literally copy and paste to set it up. I admit, I'd already done it my own way, but Linux is not what it was five years ago. Just because YOU find it painful to use Linux doesn't actually make me wrong here; while I'm pulling this entirely out of my ass
This is about announcing a tactic specifically intended to promote Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
To what end?
It's not about protecting the man. If they were really interested in protecting him, they wouldn't announce they were going to be jamming cell signals, they'd just do it, rather than give advance warning that a different trigger method might have more efficacy
True, it does seem kind of a stupid move now. Yet it does not have absolutely no merit. For instance, it may seem kind of stupid to tell people that you're putting them through a metal detector, and subjecting their luggage to an x-ray scan, since after all, a potential hijacker could simply resort to glass knives strapped to his body, or guns made to not look at all like guns when subjected to xrays.
Also, I would think that a fucking helecoptor tailing the president would tend to give it away...
and then, if you heard anything about it at all, it would be some story on the news about a temporary glitch in the phone networks or maybe even a cell tower virus that was identified and stopped.
Or also someone else who died as a result of a 911 call not going through. (Or 000 in Australia.) I don't give a damn about someone being inconvenienced, but you do want to let the good guys know ahead of time that they're going to have to find another way to get emergency help.
Last time I checked, Australia wasn't exactly a boiling cauldron of amorphous, violent, insurgent activity attempting to repel a foreign invasion. Nor was it characterized as a hotbed of Al'Quaida activity, with enemies at every turn.
True enough. But if you're wrong, and they let down security, and the president gets killed?
I mean, ordinarily, I'm a give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death type. But really, it's just cell phones. Big fucking deal.
Anyway, I think you missed my point:
Not to belabour your point about Ghandi or King, who were indeed both great men, but this technology would not have saved either of them. (They were both killed by gunmen.)
I think it's Gandhi (and there's a significant difference in Sanskrit, not sure about Hindi). But the point was not about this particular technology per se, but the fact that being loved won't save you either. This technology, and things like it, are not needed because Bush is so hated, they're needed because Bush is the POTUS.
In the early, early days of Firefox, Internet Explorer was pretty slow and bloated. Most of its snappiness came from being "part of the OS". (Or I was a deluded fanboy then, maybe...)
So, on Windows, you had the choice between Netscape (which was big and bloated), or Mozilla if you were smart (which was also big and bloated), or IE (which was bloated, for a browser). Mozilla was not so terribly bloated, except for the fact that it was a browser/mail/news/irc/dev platform/kitchen sink, and not just a browser. So, if you needed web and email, Mozilla was fine, but if you just needed web, IE was faster.
At the time, I believe Opera was somewhat buggy, and still cost money. I am not sure whether Konqueror existed or not; I only fairly recently became aware of KDE as being better than GNOME in just about every way (at least, as a desktop environment).
So, the Phoenix project was started. I used that from maybe 0.6, and it was good. A bit unstable, yes, but it would come back up in 2 seconds. And on the machines of the time, that was pretty damned impressive. It only seemed to be getting smaller and lighter. If anything was slow/buggy about it, it was that Phoenix required the full Mozilla sources, but the existance of Phoenix was actually cleaning up quite a bit of Mozilla.
And yeah -- Phoenix vs Mozilla was amazingly dramatic. Consider that Windows at the time sucked so much (at least for me) that I'd have used Linux even if it meant using Netscape 4.0, Mozilla was kind of ok. But Phoenix just kicked ass.
Now it's Firefox, though, which has sort of just become a word, and lost its meaning. I know why they changed the name, but still, Phoenix was cool -- the beast that was Mozilla (stomping on IE) had died, but from its ashes, Phoenix rose and became Firebird, something that could fly on its own, with no concern for IE at all...
So, where'd all that go?
Well, some of it's memory leaks. Some of it's almost by design -- note that Firefox uses Gecko for EVERYTHING. Firefox doesn't just embed Gecko, it IS a Gecko app. The menus, config options, the entire UI is coded in XUL, which is basically XML + JavaScript, with some C++ libraries. (Correct me if I'm wrong here.) Firefox itself was an AJAX app before AJAX even had a name. (And so was Mozilla.)
That's another part of it, but it's not really the whole picture.
Extensions, I think, are what kills it. The more extensions you add, the more likely you are to break something. At the same time, extensions are what sold it. There's still two that I miss dearly, now that I mostly use Konqueror -- adblock (the real adblock is so much better than Konqueror's adblock) and unplug (lets you download anything normally viewed via browser plugins, including YouTube videos as FLV files). For awhile, you could even get Thunderbird as an extension -- it was called something else at the time, I think -- and you still can get Sunbird as a Firefox or Thunderbird extension.
Extensions are the killer feature of Firefox, and they are also what kills Firefox performance.
I think it could have been a bit better. I know part of it is bad/buggy extensions, but I imagine part of it is also that extensions are written in XUL/JavaScript. I mean, yes, that enables them -- it's easy to transition from web developer to Firefox extension hacker -- but I do wonder, occasionally, if we could do better, starting from scratch. Konqueror is right out (though we might borrow KHTML or Gecko for awhile), but maybe something written in, say, Python, or LISP, or some good language with a really solid design? Maybe a killer app for its platform, so that people start making Python faster to make their browser faster? (If you think Python is fast enough, you're deluded -- why does the GIL still exist in these days of multicore processors?)
Well, actually, according to the books, Master Chief is creepily pale, from being in that suit most of the time, and being inside (training underground and on space stations) for most of his life.
Not as bad as Acne, but you can imagine he might want to spend some time in the tanning salon before showing his face to the world.
Maybe I should clarify: I'm not trying to justify piracy, or paint it as the only option. I'm trying to point out that piracy can have positive effects, whereas it's much harder to see cheating having any kind of positive effect.
attempt to protect a man so (deservedly) loathed that they think something like this might actually be necessary.
I can't say I'd be sorry if Bush was dead. (That's not a threat, for any Secret Service listening -- I do not intend to kill him, but if it did happen, I wouldn't shed any tears.)
But, let's be honest, here: No matter who it is, if they're famous enough, there's probably someone who wants to kill them for some irrational reason. Consider Gandhi -- pretty much universally loved and respected, even by his (former) enemies, and then someone just randomly shoots him.
And in the case of Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, I'm glad we have tech like this. If they had lived another day, I really don't care who's inconvenienced by their fucking cell phone not working.
I'd suggest that we create a reference implementation -- either clean up OpenOffice or write something new, from scratch. Also, make sure OpenDocument (and anything close enough) is trademarked.
Then, if Office differs from the reference implementation in a way that breaks it, don't let them use the word "OpenDocument" until they fix it.
I assume you mean that Microsoft has things like "Spacing like Word 95" in their standard...
But the right way to do this would be to simply have a really flexible definition for "spacing", so that users could manually implement "spacing like Word 95" in their word processor, and it would be preserved in the ODF file format, without having to make ODF specifically deal with every word processor since WordPerfect 1.0.
What you might lose is the ability to as easily convert it back to a Word95 document, but you're going to lose something when you go from a more powerful format to a less powerful format anyway.
I'd say, if it's reasonably possible, other formats -> ODF should be lossless, and ODF -> other formats may be lossy, as "other formats" should be considered "legacy formats".
Given that you can get a CD on iTunes for -- what -- $10? Seems like they are asking for 15 THOUSAND times more money than they're owed, assuming they're owed anything at all.
I distinctly remember Majora's Mask not actually involving Zelda at all. If he was rescuing anything, it was a whole fucking continent, not one princess.
(Not to mention that in Ocarina of Time, he was also rescuing a whole fucking continent, and the princess.)
They mention "Ruckus" as an alternative to piracy. Here:
There are many easy and inexpensive ways to access or purchase entertainment content lawfully: Ruckus offers a free music service to college students, http://www.ruckusnetwork.com/; songs are sold individually for
less than a dollar; you can rent movies through the mail or buy them online; or you can even visit the library. Downloading content illegally through the Stanford network is not an acceptable option.
Ruckus is not an acceptable option; songs are DRM'd and Windows Media Player only.
I know of nowhere songs are sold individually for less than a dollar, and they don't mention anywhere. I thought Ruckus was free?
Renting movies through the mail and buying them online both cost money, require time to ship, and require the student to get off their ass and go get their mail. Yet the only legal downloading is encumbered with DRM, except (maybe) on iTunes, which (last I checked) has only the iTunes interface for buying stuff, meaning you can't simply buy a song with a browser on an alternate OS.
The only thing that comes close is renting DVDs at the local video store. You could just run over, rent 10 or 20 at once (or however many they let you), rip them all (or however many you have the disk space for), then take them all back the next day. You then have at least a week, maybe a month's worth of movies if you're also taking time for schoolwork. And it's not like piracy is a huge concern here, really -- you can only watch the same movies over and over so many times, right? In any case, when you're done, you're going to have to go get more. And, unless you're either made of disk space or burning DVDs like mad, you're going to have to delete most of the ones you rented last time to make way for these ones.
Couldn't you DoS this policy by just making half-assed claims?
Do exactly this. Just go to the dorms, do a quick inventory of what the room numbers are, and send at least two notices each. You can address it to "resident" for each room number, no need to know names or anything else. Alternatively, do a ping sweep (or similar tactic) on your local network, and send notices to their office regarding all IPs you hit -- or simply make shit up, you're bound to hit one or two of the firewalled ones.
Everyone, please coordinate through Slashdot or something similar. Even do it around replies to this comment. Just make sure you aren't duplicating effort. Two is enough to force every single student you troll to be disconnected, once, and fined $100. That should be enough to cause problems for their "Information Security Office" even if the students were happy, and they should be pretty genuinely pissed off about the fines. But if you send more than that, you'll just be inconveniencing the students, not the university.
Also, $100 is really enough. They do threaten that after enough notices, they'll charge $1000, but really, every student has $100 (even if they don't want to let go of it); $1000 is starting to get serious (in case this somehow backfires). I imagine they won't be fined at all, anyway, but don't be an ass.
Now, the reasons I don't agree with this policy:
Keeping up with the number of file-sharing complaints coming in under the DMCA has required almost three full-time Stanford employees. It is an irresponsible waste of Stanford's resources--your tuition dollars--to spend so much staff time responding to copyright violations.
For higher education, they do sure seem stupid here...
The solution to "spending so much staff time responding to copyright violations" should be really fucking obvious: Don't spend so much staff time responding to copyright violations! Make the students sign something when they get their network access that makes the student -- not Stanford -- responsible for the copyright violation. Then make the RIAA take it to court.
(Does this work, legally? For all I know, the DMCA might have some sort of fine about not responding to copyright violation notices...)
Of these complaints, 90% are directed at undergraduate and graduate students:
Where'd the other 10% go, pray tell?
students who are jeopardizing the Stanford network by using it as platform to steal songs, movies, TV shows, video games, books and software.
Where is your evidence that:
This activity jeopardizes the Stanford network in any way.
Any theft is taking place (it's copyright infringement, you morons).
Either this theft or copyright infringement has a correlation with any particular takedown notice.
2nd DMCA Complaint: The Information Security Office will forward a copy of the complaint to the student and to the student's Residence Dean. The student will be disconnected immediately from the network.
This is why you should send two to each -- to demonstrate how fucking bad this policy is. The MAFIAA has a history of suing grandmothers, 12-year-olds, and dead people, not to mention one woman who had never used a computer or the Internet in her life. Notice how I said "suing", NOT "sent takedown notices".
So, before they even get to the part where they drag you into court for something you didn't do, couldn't have done, or at the very least, their only proof is one screenshot that has your IP in it, Stanford will kick you off the network for the second notice, no matter who sent it or what you've done about the first notice. (The 48 hours only applies to that first notice.)
I'm sorry, but this is the kind of policy that would send me packing instantly. As in, bags packed, out the fucking door, get my transfer credits, drive to my parents' house, and explain that I need a new college. Whether or not I'd been doing anything illegal (which I have, by the way: I play DVDs that I own on Linux!)
Notice, I didn't even say "Copyright infringement"...
Even if it was about copyright infringement, let me throw out an idea. It's not really a justification, just a concept:
Maybe if a student is actually pirating interesting stuff -- V for Vendetta, Ghost in the Shell, Firefly, Mythbusters, or take your pick -- it would be part of their education. I don't mean officially, but maybe these kids would actually take something from what they pirate. Given that they're starving college students, it's not like they have the spare cash to spend on all of these things, especially if they only buy a few (I wouldn't have bought Firefly if I didn't see it somewhere first).
In other words, piracy would tend to actually challenge and educate students. Cheating can do neither of these things -- all it teaches is how to beat the system, but it also makes it possible for the student to skip some education.
But maybe it's not even about copyright infringement. Given the way the DMCA works, it is (still!) illegal to play a DVD on Linux. And, whether you love or hate Linux, you have to appreciate that a kid who's bothered to run it is probably somewhat unique in some way.
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Consider that the alternatives basically sucked when Netscape 4 was out. I guess they could've done Java, but I don't think Java was even JIT'ed, then.
Well, they do sort of want their JavaScript and XML to be fast for the web, so this could be seen as a way of eating their own dogfood.
In any case, I'm guessing JavaScript isn't a really limiting factor here. It's actually a decent language, and there have been problems to (for example) compile JavaScript into Java bytecode.
Sounds like close to what I'd do, except Gtk+ is probably not such a good idea (not for cross-platform, anyway). I'm also not sure if I'd want to keep Gecko. But it will be a few months before I start this project, if ever.
Maybe not. But "stealing" does have a different connotation. When people say "You stole my stuff!" it's possible for John Q. Public to have a knee-jerk reaction. If people say "You infringed my copyright!" then you actually have to think about it.
True enough, but that isn't the quality of RMS that I'm encouraging here. In fact, I don't agree at all with his demand that we call it "GNU/Linux". But the "free vs freedom vs open source" distinction is important, and not something you want people to be confused about. And certainly, the BSD people wouldn't want you to confuse BSD'd stuff with GPL'd stuff.
Put very, very simply: Copyright infringement is still wrong, but it's not as bad as theft. Free software is generally still "free as in beer", but it's generally better quality than freeware.
Most of them are. Try not to take it so personally, especially if you're going to post as Anonymous Coward.
Good to hear. Now would you mind telling me why the burden of proof is on Stanford and the students, and not those filing the complaints?
A takedown notice can do that? Without any proof?
Well, shit -- stalkers unite! Give me an IP address, I'll send a fake DMCA takedown notice to your ISP to get your name and address.
Also: Liable for what others do with their property? First, it's complete bullshit, otherwise I'd be seeing hundreds of people in court for their part in a botnet. They not only own the IP, but the hardware that sent me the Spam, or infected me, or whatever. Second... Where else is this true at all? If someone borrows or rents my car and uses it to kill someone, am I liable for homocide?
No, it's common knowledge that the best chance of having supported hardware in Linux is to check online to make sure it's supported. Just as you would with a Mac, or, back in the day, with Windows.
Which is also not the point. You didn't ask for Photoshop, you asked for photo editing software. Linux is not Windows, either.
Gimp is also not the only game in town. There's also Krita and OpenOffice Draw. I doubt either is comparable, but I also doubt that most people who only need to do simple photo editing are going to miss the more advanced features from Gimp or Photoshop. People who need to do fairly advanced photo editing would also be the ones to benefit from any areas in which the gimp may be better than Photoshop -- I know there are people who prefer Gimp to Photoshop, although most of them were not raised on photoshop.
No, but it does mean you can ease them in. Get them using the Gimp on Windows, and you save yourself quite a bit of upgrade cost, and maybe over a year or two, slowly replace most of their software with opensource equivalents. Then, the switch to Linux should be much more painless.
Would you show me someone's opinion other than yours? Everyone I actually get to use OpenOffice sees it as a drop-in replacement for Office, except that they can't be bothered to have more than one office suite. The one drawback: OpenOffice is huge, and sucks up a huge chunk of RAM.
If you're willing to trade functionality for speed, there's also AbiWord, Gnumeric, and Koffice (split much more cleanly into components than OpenOffice).
25 years, and then it's solid, guaranteed profit. But I'm glad you're not my financial advisor, because I was using that as a starting point: If it costs $1k of your time, AND if you would have paid the absolute minimum in Windows upgrades, that's what you get.
Erm? I thought "the hassle" was exactly what I was counting in $1000 of your time.
I gladly give up commercial support, because I know I won't generally need support once I have a Linux box up and running. Compatibility is mostly there -- I have never had problems opening Office documents. And the features I gain with Linux (financial concerns being, honestly, somewhat small) are easily worth whatever features I lose from Windows.
I must have been when I used Gentoo. Now I use Ubuntu, and I don't have to "find my own solution".
Let me put it this way: I just Googled for "Ubuntu DVD Playback", and the first result was ubuntuguide.org. Searched the page for DVD playback, and found four commands that I could literally copy and paste to set it up. I admit, I'd already done it my own way, but Linux is not what it was five years ago. Just because YOU find it painful to use Linux doesn't actually make me wrong here; while I'm pulling this entirely out of my ass
To what end?
True, it does seem kind of a stupid move now. Yet it does not have absolutely no merit. For instance, it may seem kind of stupid to tell people that you're putting them through a metal detector, and subjecting their luggage to an x-ray scan, since after all, a potential hijacker could simply resort to glass knives strapped to his body, or guns made to not look at all like guns when subjected to xrays.
Also, I would think that a fucking helecoptor tailing the president would tend to give it away...
Or also someone else who died as a result of a 911 call not going through. (Or 000 in Australia.) I don't give a damn about someone being inconvenienced, but you do want to let the good guys know ahead of time that they're going to have to find another way to get emergency help.
True enough. But if you're wrong, and they let down security, and the president gets killed?
I mean, ordinarily, I'm a give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death type. But really, it's just cell phones. Big fucking deal.
Anyway, I think you missed my point:
I think it's Gandhi (and there's a significant difference in Sanskrit, not sure about Hindi). But the point was not about this particular technology per se, but the fact that being loved won't save you either. This technology, and things like it, are not needed because Bush is so hated, they're needed because Bush is the POTUS.
I was there.
In the early, early days of Firefox, Internet Explorer was pretty slow and bloated. Most of its snappiness came from being "part of the OS". (Or I was a deluded fanboy then, maybe...)
So, on Windows, you had the choice between Netscape (which was big and bloated), or Mozilla if you were smart (which was also big and bloated), or IE (which was bloated, for a browser). Mozilla was not so terribly bloated, except for the fact that it was a browser/mail/news/irc/dev platform/kitchen sink, and not just a browser. So, if you needed web and email, Mozilla was fine, but if you just needed web, IE was faster.
At the time, I believe Opera was somewhat buggy, and still cost money. I am not sure whether Konqueror existed or not; I only fairly recently became aware of KDE as being better than GNOME in just about every way (at least, as a desktop environment).
So, the Phoenix project was started. I used that from maybe 0.6, and it was good. A bit unstable, yes, but it would come back up in 2 seconds. And on the machines of the time, that was pretty damned impressive. It only seemed to be getting smaller and lighter. If anything was slow/buggy about it, it was that Phoenix required the full Mozilla sources, but the existance of Phoenix was actually cleaning up quite a bit of Mozilla.
And yeah -- Phoenix vs Mozilla was amazingly dramatic. Consider that Windows at the time sucked so much (at least for me) that I'd have used Linux even if it meant using Netscape 4.0, Mozilla was kind of ok. But Phoenix just kicked ass.
Now it's Firefox, though, which has sort of just become a word, and lost its meaning. I know why they changed the name, but still, Phoenix was cool -- the beast that was Mozilla (stomping on IE) had died, but from its ashes, Phoenix rose and became Firebird, something that could fly on its own, with no concern for IE at all...
So, where'd all that go?
Well, some of it's memory leaks. Some of it's almost by design -- note that Firefox uses Gecko for EVERYTHING. Firefox doesn't just embed Gecko, it IS a Gecko app. The menus, config options, the entire UI is coded in XUL, which is basically XML + JavaScript, with some C++ libraries. (Correct me if I'm wrong here.) Firefox itself was an AJAX app before AJAX even had a name. (And so was Mozilla.)
That's another part of it, but it's not really the whole picture.
Extensions, I think, are what kills it. The more extensions you add, the more likely you are to break something. At the same time, extensions are what sold it. There's still two that I miss dearly, now that I mostly use Konqueror -- adblock (the real adblock is so much better than Konqueror's adblock) and unplug (lets you download anything normally viewed via browser plugins, including YouTube videos as FLV files). For awhile, you could even get Thunderbird as an extension -- it was called something else at the time, I think -- and you still can get Sunbird as a Firefox or Thunderbird extension.
Extensions are the killer feature of Firefox, and they are also what kills Firefox performance.
I think it could have been a bit better. I know part of it is bad/buggy extensions, but I imagine part of it is also that extensions are written in XUL/JavaScript. I mean, yes, that enables them -- it's easy to transition from web developer to Firefox extension hacker -- but I do wonder, occasionally, if we could do better, starting from scratch. Konqueror is right out (though we might borrow KHTML or Gecko for awhile), but maybe something written in, say, Python, or LISP, or some good language with a really solid design? Maybe a killer app for its platform, so that people start making Python faster to make their browser faster? (If you think Python is fast enough, you're deluded -- why does the GIL still exist in these days of multicore processors?)
Well, actually, according to the books, Master Chief is creepily pale, from being in that suit most of the time, and being inside (training underground and on space stations) for most of his life.
Not as bad as Acne, but you can imagine he might want to spend some time in the tanning salon before showing his face to the world.
Maybe I should clarify: I'm not trying to justify piracy, or paint it as the only option. I'm trying to point out that piracy can have positive effects, whereas it's much harder to see cheating having any kind of positive effect.
In the actual cinema, someone's going to get up and go to the bathroom, whereas in actual pirated movies, they aren't.
In fact, isn't that why we have the DMCA and DRM? Because they're so fucking terrified of a perfect 1:1 copy (DVD ISOs)?
I can't say I'd be sorry if Bush was dead. (That's not a threat, for any Secret Service listening -- I do not intend to kill him, but if it did happen, I wouldn't shed any tears.)
But, let's be honest, here: No matter who it is, if they're famous enough, there's probably someone who wants to kill them for some irrational reason. Consider Gandhi -- pretty much universally loved and respected, even by his (former) enemies, and then someone just randomly shoots him.
And in the case of Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, I'm glad we have tech like this. If they had lived another day, I really don't care who's inconvenienced by their fucking cell phone not working.
I'd suggest that we create a reference implementation -- either clean up OpenOffice or write something new, from scratch. Also, make sure OpenDocument (and anything close enough) is trademarked.
Then, if Office differs from the reference implementation in a way that breaks it, don't let them use the word "OpenDocument" until they fix it.
All true... Note, however, that Safari was also the first one to pass the Acid2 test.
So, behind on JavaScript, but ahead on CSS?
I assume you mean that Microsoft has things like "Spacing like Word 95" in their standard...
But the right way to do this would be to simply have a really flexible definition for "spacing", so that users could manually implement "spacing like Word 95" in their word processor, and it would be preserved in the ODF file format, without having to make ODF specifically deal with every word processor since WordPerfect 1.0.
What you might lose is the ability to as easily convert it back to a Word95 document, but you're going to lose something when you go from a more powerful format to a less powerful format anyway.
I'd say, if it's reasonably possible, other formats -> ODF should be lossless, and ODF -> other formats may be lossy, as "other formats" should be considered "legacy formats".
Because presumably, we've already done the research, and haven't found anything, or have missed something obvious. Please, enlightend us.
RMS is a bit rabid for my tastes, but he does make a point to be precise about language, and refuses to talk to people who won't be similarly precise.
So: It is NOT theft, or stealing. It is copyright infringement.
Given that you can get a CD on iTunes for -- what -- $10? Seems like they are asking for 15 THOUSAND times more money than they're owed, assuming they're owed anything at all.
What's funny is, since you posted AC, it takes exactly one modpoint to drop you to -1, Troll. That's one of five...
Isn't it time Master Chief's helmet came off? Or Gordon Freeman talked (or we saw his face in-game)?
Either of those would completely change the character, and depending on how pedantic a fan you are, could kill the series for you.
I distinctly remember Majora's Mask not actually involving Zelda at all. If he was rescuing anything, it was a whole fucking continent, not one princess.
(Not to mention that in Ocarina of Time, he was also rescuing a whole fucking continent, and the princess.)
Not everything that's worth watching is in their library.
And reading a book is great, but it won't teach you the same thing. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad.
They mention "Ruckus" as an alternative to piracy. Here:
Ruckus is not an acceptable option; songs are DRM'd and Windows Media Player only.
I know of nowhere songs are sold individually for less than a dollar, and they don't mention anywhere. I thought Ruckus was free?
Renting movies through the mail and buying them online both cost money, require time to ship, and require the student to get off their ass and go get their mail. Yet the only legal downloading is encumbered with DRM, except (maybe) on iTunes, which (last I checked) has only the iTunes interface for buying stuff, meaning you can't simply buy a song with a browser on an alternate OS.
The only thing that comes close is renting DVDs at the local video store. You could just run over, rent 10 or 20 at once (or however many they let you), rip them all (or however many you have the disk space for), then take them all back the next day. You then have at least a week, maybe a month's worth of movies if you're also taking time for schoolwork. And it's not like piracy is a huge concern here, really -- you can only watch the same movies over and over so many times, right? In any case, when you're done, you're going to have to go get more. And, unless you're either made of disk space or burning DVDs like mad, you're going to have to delete most of the ones you rented last time to make way for these ones.
I think that's harsh, but regardless, read the rest of it. After the 2nd notice, the student is automatically disconnected.
So what's to stop them from simply ignoring said notices? I mean, they're a University, surely they're smart enough to say: "Subpeona us, bitches!"
Do exactly this. Just go to the dorms, do a quick inventory of what the room numbers are, and send at least two notices each. You can address it to "resident" for each room number, no need to know names or anything else. Alternatively, do a ping sweep (or similar tactic) on your local network, and send notices to their office regarding all IPs you hit -- or simply make shit up, you're bound to hit one or two of the firewalled ones.
Everyone, please coordinate through Slashdot or something similar. Even do it around replies to this comment. Just make sure you aren't duplicating effort. Two is enough to force every single student you troll to be disconnected, once, and fined $100. That should be enough to cause problems for their "Information Security Office" even if the students were happy, and they should be pretty genuinely pissed off about the fines. But if you send more than that, you'll just be inconveniencing the students, not the university.
Also, $100 is really enough. They do threaten that after enough notices, they'll charge $1000, but really, every student has $100 (even if they don't want to let go of it); $1000 is starting to get serious (in case this somehow backfires). I imagine they won't be fined at all, anyway, but don't be an ass.
Now, the reasons I don't agree with this policy:
For higher education, they do sure seem stupid here...
The solution to "spending so much staff time responding to copyright violations" should be really fucking obvious: Don't spend so much staff time responding to copyright violations! Make the students sign something when they get their network access that makes the student -- not Stanford -- responsible for the copyright violation. Then make the RIAA take it to court.
(Does this work, legally? For all I know, the DMCA might have some sort of fine about not responding to copyright violation notices...)
Where'd the other 10% go, pray tell?
Where is your evidence that:
This is why you should send two to each -- to demonstrate how fucking bad this policy is. The MAFIAA has a history of suing grandmothers, 12-year-olds, and dead people, not to mention one woman who had never used a computer or the Internet in her life. Notice how I said "suing", NOT "sent takedown notices".
So, before they even get to the part where they drag you into court for something you didn't do, couldn't have done, or at the very least, their only proof is one screenshot that has your IP in it, Stanford will kick you off the network for the second notice, no matter who sent it or what you've done about the first notice. (The 48 hours only applies to that first notice.)
I'm sorry, but this is the kind of policy that would send me packing instantly. As in, bags packed, out the fucking door, get my transfer credits, drive to my parents' house, and explain that I need a new college. Whether or not I'd been doing anything illegal (which I have, by the way: I play DVDs that I own on Linux!)
Notice, I didn't even say "Copyright infringement"...
Even if it was about copyright infringement, let me throw out an idea. It's not really a justification, just a concept:
Maybe if a student is actually pirating interesting stuff -- V for Vendetta, Ghost in the Shell, Firefly, Mythbusters, or take your pick -- it would be part of their education. I don't mean officially, but maybe these kids would actually take something from what they pirate. Given that they're starving college students, it's not like they have the spare cash to spend on all of these things, especially if they only buy a few (I wouldn't have bought Firefly if I didn't see it somewhere first).
In other words, piracy would tend to actually challenge and educate students. Cheating can do neither of these things -- all it teaches is how to beat the system, but it also makes it possible for the student to skip some education.
But maybe it's not even about copyright infringement. Given the way the DMCA works, it is (still!) illegal to play a DVD on Linux. And, whether you love or hate Linux, you have to appreciate that a kid who's bothered to run it is probably somewhat unique in some way.