Netscape 3.5 has never existed, because the last version of Netscape 3.0x was 3.04. The next major release with a.5 version was 4.5, which was not particularly stable. The Gold release applied to the 3.0x version and included what can now be understood as a very primitive HTML editor.
What Netscape was good at, was that it was a great tool to debug websites with bad code, because its rendering engine was so sensitive: if a page worked in Netscape 4, it worked everywhere else, too. The last 4.x version of Netscape was 4.8.
They didn't even have to reach that magical 10% market share to get forks around (F/OSS and all). These have been spawned well before and since the naming dispute with Debian (result is IceWeasel).
There's little need for infighting within Firefox, as all the numerous Gecko-based projects fill their niches anyway. The F/OSS nature of software allows developers to part their ways and continue doing the own thing anyway.
A more important denominator in the future might become application resource usage and feature set versus security.
An example consideration for a computer with 128M RAM, a viable CPU and an older operating system:
The latest K-Meleon (1.5.3) has a slightly newer Gecko engine than Firefox 2.0.0.20 (1.8.1.21 vs. 1.8.1.20). K-Meleon is evidently faster, but may lack important extensions, so it's good for old PC's (64M RAM and weak CPU) and sports its own set of extensions.
Enter SeaMonkey 1.1.16 (Gecko 1.9.0.9). Assuming its framework has not changed too much since Mozilla Application Suite was first released, its system requirements should pretty much be the same that Mozilla 1.0.x used to need to run properly. Add extensions and choice versions of plugins that should not force a big dent in resource usage (watch out for security with older plugins).
Giving every file a frameset breaks the purpose of frames in the first place.
I've seen this happen since the times of the Old Good Netscape 3 and 4. The visual effect of it is, that if you click on a menu item in the frameset, only the target frame changes contents. With frames applied to every file, every time you navigate to a new page, the whole viewport blinks into the new frameset, multiplying the number of requests with the number of surrounding frames and their contents.
The purpose of frames was to offset the demand on servers, as a good number of web designers back then were not aware of Server Side Includes and this made it convenient not to use server-side (and server-based) implementations in the first place, especially if the website was sufficiently small. The other advantage with frames was that only the content part could be scrolled, while the menu was kept static and it did not have to be requested again.
Actually, one of the functions that the XP/Vista Starter and 7 Basic are very likely to serve (in emerging markets that are eager to go legal, presumably) is the locked down workstation option, where users shouldn't be able to run a large amount of _applications_ anyway, or when just one application is required for a specific task. These places are public or with a large number of (mostly clueless and then some very clever) users: the school/Internet café/library/workplace; basically anything that requires low maintenance, durability and limitations on users.
Microsoft may possibly be taking the long shot by estimating that these target groups will have a sufficiently secure system running for about a decade or so -- or in about a decade or so, when hardware will be sufficiently cheap to run all of that in a non-home environment.
It's also good for such small target groups that want to run low on maintenance.
Office politics and IssueZilla comments aside ("not good or whatever for this or that"), the bugs that get the most attention are the ones that get the most votes there, so the system at large is priority-based, which means that what the current developers are looking at are feature requests that eliminate barriers to entry, which force users to use proprietary solutions. Most of the feature requests are rather old and outstanding. Some depend on improvements and additions to the OpenDocument format. Changing that amounts to digging through some of the bureaucracy (technical committees, etc.).
If you didn't know yet, the document Notes/Comments feature was drastically improved in OO.o 3.0, while the old functionality lingered there for well over 10 years, since the times of StarOffice. The earliest related bug for that is Issue 767, which was opened on April 24th, 2001. Some Notes development now depends on changes to the ODF file format, as does development of other functionality that affects the file format itself.
Some of the larger items that the dev's are working on (IMHO):
The framework and getting it more modularized, so that various large projects making their own branded software will only use the components that they need. The situation is best described here, here and here.
File format support and compatibility. This is mostly related to Office Open XML (known as MS Office 2007 format). That work is rather extensive, because so far there's some stuff that is yet to be done wrt pre-MS Office 2007 formats, while OOXML support needs continuous improvement and is still raw at places.
Mac Aqua port. So far, OO.o had to be run through X11 on Mac OS X.
One of the best things framework-wise they did so far is getting the extensions system working. Michael Meeks is right about the number of committed developers; the extensions system should now make it easier for third party developers to create required functionality that can be quickly added, while taking some heat off the main developers. The extensions system also made it possible to ditch the bulky and inflexible way dictionaries were managed.
The Linux kernel The benefit of running the latest 2.6.xx kernel instead of 2.4.xx is better overall security, resource management and better hardware support. The Linux 1.x tree probably doesn't support ext3 and other advanced stuff, because that depends on newer libraries, which in turn want a newer kernel to function. If you still want to run something on a very old machine, then perhaps give any of the *BSD's a try. That's how I see it.
Well, it looks like someone beat you to it already, with the most interesting issues being 72559, 72957 and 81365. Issue #72559 so far has 79 votes (which is quite a lot for a a bug marked as DEFECT) and since the changes involve the framework and drastically changing the UI, the target was unfortunately set to 3.0/as this version reportedly won't support Windows 98/Me anymore:/.
If you find documentation for OOo Help lacking, then use Extended Tips by switching them on at
Tools > Options > In the left sidebar, expand OpenOffice.org > select General > check the Extended Tips check box, click OK.
After that, you'll see very descriptive tool tips that should be able to explain a feature or a check box... You can also try out the Help Agent, although I am not using it.
and therein edit the dictionary.lst file (preferably in WordPad if you use Windows, because the files use a UNIX carriage return) to comment out undesired languages.
Make sure OpenOffice.org and/or its QuickStarter are not running while you do the moving.
Moving dictionaries should speed up startup performance and you might as well feel the difference on computers with five-year-old specs.
If a required language dictionary is missing, you can fix this by downloading a new one through
I used Netscape 4.08 so much, that I managed to observe the following rendering issues, most of which are listed below:
I once realised that turning off CSS support did the actual trick and stopped most crashes. Most sites would just crash Netscape 4.x (if style sheet support was turned on), alone because of poorly deployed CSS implementations, whereby not many websites actually cared to use the @-rule.
Another crash cause was when people were using an older computer and writing too long texts in textareas. I thought that there was some predetermined buffer set for just one textarea and if someone kept writing too much into it, the browser eventually crashed.
My solution to this was to use Notepad in Windows or gnotepad+ in Linux to write longer texts, then paste them into a textarea and then submit the text.
Another thing that keeps hanging Netscape 4.x may indeed have something to do with nested tables. While nested tables with text actually rendered okay after they were downloaded, then the infamous Netscape Table Choke was caused by having inaccessible images in them -- Tables with images wouldn't render before Netscape 4.x had information about the images' dimensions, which is why it was very important to specify image dimensions in code, so that the table would render before one or another image was downloaded.
Those smart enough to specify image dimensions in HTML were able to avoid this issue in part, because tables with inaccessible images (if a server went down or somesuch) wouldn't render until there was a request timeout done for all images.
Netscape 4.x in part supported text antialiasing (in Windows 98, I remember) and this might also have caused crashes, probably due to buggy video drivers, which I didn't know to update at that time.
AOL should have actually quietly released 6.0.x and then recommended for users not to download and install until it said so.
I remember SPSS does this with their software (I also remember this bit by reading its Wikipedia page once, but that bit does not seem to be there anymore, now that I've skimmed through it...), when they make release because they have to and then recommend against users deploying it until they say so.
The PPT file is a bit more than 1 megabyte and only one slide (out of 138 or so) contains a large WMF image. Granted, the computer I used to open the file isn't new (Celeron 900, 128M RAM, Windows 98), but I had to wait like 5 (five) minutes for the presentation to open just because of that WMF file, which had to be converted, too. And that was with OpenOffice.org 2.0.4. Seeing the file without having to open it in OOo and wait for a long time means using the PowerPoint Viewer.
The total time to open the file was about 15-30 seconds less with OOo 2.1. After exporting the WMF, I discovered that it was 36Mb in size.
I am going to download OOo 2.3 as soon as possible after its release, because I read that it contains a speedup related to images (specifically, a speedup of image lists, which may solve another problem I saw when using earlier 2.x.x versions).
You probably should have shut off any resource-hungry functionality, much of which is visual stuff.
MCE 2005's system requirements are higher than those of Windows XP. While you probably had every other requirement right, the required CPU must be at least at 1.6GHz or somesuch.
In such a case, it's usually best to install converters, if Office 2007 is not yet deployed. I think many people (and perhaps IT departments) forget this.
Buying one retail Office 2007 for converting documents in-house in one of the computers dedicated for this is also a solution.
There is usually a fine line between any polarizing idea, and thus balance must be struck between either number of opposing paradigms.
Innovators must be protected, but not necessarily the companies and repressive ideologies (or anything repressive for that matter) which earn billions off of their hard work.
Comparing the effectiveness of either little or no protection is tricky: Which is more effective? Is the moderately protected system better than the overprotected system, because it encourages more innovation; — or perhaps the overprotectedness of a system is better, because the extent of overprotection forces (or stimulates) people to create something uniquely new that builds little on other people's work, but is impossible to develop further by anyone else (but the inventor) past the patent expiry date?
What can lead to stagnation, though, is when innovation is stifled by any way or method that actively or just by proxy suppresses ideas and thoughts, discussing them, etc. New ideas and concepts are not useful when voluntary propagation of these may land you in jail or otherwise cause considerable (such as legal) discomfort.
For example, it's not good to innovate in Texas, because companies there have complete right to their workers' mindshare, thus it's somewhat better to be an innovator in California. In either case should and must an innovator not divulge his idea before he submits a patent application.
Another example is the Soviet Union, where applying most of R&D stayed within the Soviet military complex and some research in many subjects was outright suppressed or was taboo at best. Both articles cite reasons from insufficient funding compared to all kinds of military projects (10/90% ratio) to discouragement of new ideas for ideological reasons and then of export restrictions to the SU and then corruption.
I might as well submit something later in addition...
Well, their beer is cheap. Not free, but still something. AFAIK. Beautiful nature, mountains, lots of tourist attractions, historic cities. Never been there myself, though.
While I thought that it's easier to copy names with accented characters off Wikipedia as there does exist an article about Thành then seeing the name with accented characters is a different business, especially when support for Vietnamese accented characters is not installed. This was of great help in trying to overcome that hurdle.
In 'Hàn Th Thành', I can't see the ế character, likely because the page in Slashdot uses ISO-8859-1 encoding, whereas pages in UTF-8 show it correctly.
One way to make it universally visible is like this: 'Hàn Thê’ Thành', using an e with a circumflex and then adding the right single quotation mark (’) next to it, because any other character remotely similar to an acute character fails to show for some reason. The right single quotation mark can be confused with a apostrophe when text is at its normal size (Arial font). To see the difference, the text size has to be increased twice in Firefox 2 (this experienced in Windows 98).
Slashdot Mirror
Netscape 3.5 has never existed, because the last version of Netscape 3.0x was 3.04. The next major release with a .5 version was 4.5, which was not particularly stable. The Gold release applied to the 3.0x version and included what can now be understood as a very primitive HTML editor.
What Netscape was good at, was that it was a great tool to debug websites with bad code, because its rendering engine was so sensitive: if a page worked in Netscape 4, it worked everywhere else, too. The last 4.x version of Netscape was 4.8.
10-15 years ago and then some, the mantra was: "Resistance is futile!"
There's little need for infighting within Firefox, as all the numerous Gecko-based projects fill their niches anyway. The F/OSS nature of software allows developers to part their ways and continue doing the own thing anyway.
A more important denominator in the future might become application resource usage and feature set versus security.
An example consideration for a computer with 128M RAM, a viable CPU and an older operating system:
The latest K-Meleon (1.5.3) has a slightly newer Gecko engine than Firefox 2.0.0.20 (1.8.1.21 vs. 1.8.1.20). K-Meleon is evidently faster, but may lack important extensions, so it's good for old PC's (64M RAM and weak CPU) and sports its own set of extensions.
Enter SeaMonkey 1.1.16 (Gecko 1.9.0.9). Assuming its framework has not changed too much since Mozilla Application Suite was first released, its system requirements should pretty much be the same that Mozilla 1.0.x used to need to run properly. Add extensions and choice versions of plugins that should not force a big dent in resource usage (watch out for security with older plugins).
Giving every file a frameset breaks the purpose of frames in the first place.
I've seen this happen since the times of the Old Good Netscape 3 and 4. The visual effect of it is, that if you click on a menu item in the frameset, only the target frame changes contents. With frames applied to every file, every time you navigate to a new page, the whole viewport blinks into the new frameset, multiplying the number of requests with the number of surrounding frames and their contents.
The purpose of frames was to offset the demand on servers, as a good number of web designers back then were not aware of Server Side Includes and this made it convenient not to use server-side (and server-based) implementations in the first place, especially if the website was sufficiently small. The other advantage with frames was that only the content part could be scrolled, while the menu was kept static and it did not have to be requested again.
n is the size of a statistical sample.
Some kids get behind in a class and so they have to attend summer school and someone has to be there to teach.
Actually, one of the functions that the XP/Vista Starter and 7 Basic are very likely to serve (in emerging markets that are eager to go legal, presumably) is the locked down workstation option, where users shouldn't be able to run a large amount of _applications_ anyway, or when just one application is required for a specific task. These places are public or with a large number of (mostly clueless and then some very clever) users: the school/Internet café/library/workplace; basically anything that requires low maintenance, durability and limitations on users.
Microsoft may possibly be taking the long shot by estimating that these target groups will have a sufficiently secure system running for about a decade or so -- or in about a decade or so, when hardware will be sufficiently cheap to run all of that in a non-home environment.
It's also good for such small target groups that want to run low on maintenance.
If you didn't know yet, the document Notes/Comments feature was drastically improved in OO.o 3.0, while the old functionality lingered there for well over 10 years, since the times of StarOffice. The earliest related bug for that is Issue 767, which was opened on April 24th, 2001. Some Notes development now depends on changes to the ODF file format, as does development of other functionality that affects the file format itself.
Some of the larger items that the dev's are working on (IMHO):
One of the best things framework-wise they did so far is getting the extensions system working. Michael Meeks is right about the number of committed developers; the extensions system should now make it easier for third party developers to create required functionality that can be quickly added, while taking some heat off the main developers. The extensions system also made it possible to ditch the bulky and inflexible way dictionaries were managed.
The Linux kernel
The benefit of running the latest 2.6.xx kernel instead of 2.4.xx is better overall security, resource management and better hardware support. The Linux 1.x tree probably doesn't support ext3 and other advanced stuff, because that depends on newer libraries, which in turn want a newer kernel to function. If you still want to run something on a very old machine, then perhaps give any of the *BSD's a try. That's how I see it.
The floppy disk that you refer to was actually 3½" in size. 1.44 Mb is the marketing amount of floppy disks.
Well, it looks like someone beat you to it already, with the most interesting issues being 72559, 72957 and 81365. Issue #72559 so far has 79 votes (which is quite a lot for a a bug marked as DEFECT) and since the changes involve the framework and drastically changing the UI, the target was unfortunately set to 3.0 /as this version reportedly won't support Windows 98/Me anymore :/.
If you find documentation for OOo Help lacking, then use Extended Tips by switching them on at
Tools > Options > In the left sidebar, expand OpenOffice.org > select General > check the Extended Tips check box, click OK.
After that, you'll see very descriptive tool tips that should be able to explain a feature or a check box... You can also try out the Help Agent, although I am not using it.
Usually, the simple thing is to uncheck dictionary checkboxes at
Tools > Options > Language Settings > Writing Aids > Edit (button) available language modules > select undesired language from drop-down box.
In Windows, move undesired dictionaries to some other (backup) location from
C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.4\share\dict\ooo
and therein edit the dictionary.lst file (preferably in WordPad if you use Windows, because the files use a UNIX carriage return) to comment out undesired languages.
Make sure OpenOffice.org and/or its QuickStarter are not running while you do the moving.
Moving dictionaries should speed up startup performance and you might as well feel the difference on computers with five-year-old specs.
If a required language dictionary is missing, you can fix this by downloading a new one through
File > Wizards > Install New Dictionaries .
My solution to this was to use Notepad in Windows or gnotepad+ in Linux to write longer texts, then paste them into a textarea and then submit the text.
Those smart enough to specify image dimensions in HTML were able to avoid this issue in part, because tables with inaccessible images (if a server went down or somesuch) wouldn't render until there was a request timeout done for all images.
AOL should have actually quietly released 6.0.x and then recommended for users not to download and install until it said so.
I remember SPSS does this with their software (I also remember this bit by reading its Wikipedia page once, but that bit does not seem to be there anymore, now that I've skimmed through it...), when they make release because they have to and then recommend against users deploying it until they say so.
Exactly which Union (as in 'non-union') do you have in mind?
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer/ToDo#Lotus_WordPro_filter
It's called QuickStarter. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickstarter fore more relevant information.
The PPT file is a bit more than 1 megabyte and only one slide (out of 138 or so) contains a large WMF image. Granted, the computer I used to open the file isn't new (Celeron 900, 128M RAM, Windows 98), but I had to wait like 5 (five) minutes for the presentation to open just because of that WMF file, which had to be converted, too. And that was with OpenOffice.org 2.0.4. Seeing the file without having to open it in OOo and wait for a long time means using the PowerPoint Viewer.
The total time to open the file was about 15-30 seconds less with OOo 2.1. After exporting the WMF, I discovered that it was 36Mb in size.
I am going to download OOo 2.3 as soon as possible after its release, because I read that it contains a speedup related to images (specifically, a speedup of image lists, which may solve another problem I saw when using earlier 2.x.x versions).
You probably should have shut off any resource-hungry functionality, much of which is visual stuff.
MCE 2005's system requirements are higher than those of Windows XP. While you probably had every other requirement right, the required CPU must be at least at 1.6GHz or somesuch.
In such a case, it's usually best to install converters, if Office 2007 is not yet deployed. I think many people (and perhaps IT departments) forget this.
Buying one retail Office 2007 for converting documents in-house in one of the computers dedicated for this is also a solution.
Innovators must be protected, but not necessarily the companies and repressive ideologies (or anything repressive for that matter) which earn billions off of their hard work.
Comparing the effectiveness of either little or no protection is tricky: Which is more effective? Is the moderately protected system better than the overprotected system, because it encourages more innovation; — or perhaps the overprotectedness of a system is better, because the extent of overprotection forces (or stimulates) people to create something uniquely new that builds little on other people's work, but is impossible to develop further by anyone else (but the inventor) past the patent expiry date?
What can lead to stagnation, though, is when innovation is stifled by any way or method that actively or just by proxy suppresses ideas and thoughts, discussing them, etc. New ideas and concepts are not useful when voluntary propagation of these may land you in jail or otherwise cause considerable (such as legal) discomfort.
For example, it's not good to innovate in Texas, because companies there have complete right to their workers' mindshare, thus it's somewhat better to be an innovator in California. In either case should and must an innovator not divulge his idea before he submits a patent application.
Another example is the Soviet Union, where applying most of R&D stayed within the Soviet military complex and some research in many subjects was outright suppressed or was taboo at best. Both articles cite reasons from insufficient funding compared to all kinds of military projects (10/90% ratio) to discouragement of new ideas for ideological reasons and then of export restrictions to the SU and then corruption.
I might as well submit something later in addition...
That's because Wikipedia does not use trailing slashes after article names.
Here's the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_example
Well, their beer is cheap. Not free, but still something. AFAIK.
Beautiful nature, mountains, lots of tourist attractions, historic cities. Never been there myself, though.
That was Scorpius, you insensitive clod!!
While I thought that it's easier to copy names with accented characters off Wikipedia as there does exist an article about Thành then seeing the name with accented characters is a different business, especially when support for Vietnamese accented characters is not installed. This was of great help in trying to overcome that hurdle.
In 'Hàn Th Thành', I can't see the ế character, likely because the page in Slashdot uses ISO-8859-1 encoding, whereas pages in UTF-8 show it correctly.
One way to make it universally visible is like this: 'Hàn Thê’ Thành', using an e with a circumflex and then adding the right single quotation mark (’) next to it, because any other character remotely similar to an acute character fails to show for some reason. The right single quotation mark can be confused with a apostrophe when text is at its normal size (Arial font). To see the difference, the text size has to be increased twice in Firefox 2 (this experienced in Windows 98).