Usually people who exploit such security flaws find about about them by reverse engineering security updates.
I'm curious; what makes you say this? This may be true for the script kiddies out there, but aren't brighter hackers (of the sort that find the problems in the first place) more likely to target their attacks to more specific/profitable victims, making them far less detectable?
Even if they wait to launch when they support non-proprietary browsers, they've come at the problem the wrong way round. It's far simpler to start with a standards-based site, then add all the kludgy hacks IE requires.
...written with little to no thought to creating elegant code... little to do with the skill of the designer and more to do with the amount of time and cost involved
You assail the elegance employed by a huge group of programmers, then dismiss the craft as a simple commodity. You can't have it both ways.
Comparing hand-crafted wood furniture made by a master woordworker to something I can go buy from a local department store in terms of quality is a worthless comparison.
If your assertion is purely about the quality of the product, then no--this is the salient metric, the whole point of the discussion. This is equivocation.
...I would be willing to bet...
OK, but you can't really use gut feelings as evidence. If you wish to make a point, you really do need to be more specific.
...all of the programmers I know... Also, just about every good professional programmer I know
This is anecdotal evidence, which carries the risk of generalizing on too little evidence.
huge numbers of OSS projects use backwards methodologies
A claim of this magnitude ("huge") requires several examples, but you give none. In fact, this is completely counter to my own experience. Many OSS projects, in fact, exist purely to demonstrate, showcase, or test new technologies.
Saxon is the reference (pre-)implementation of XSLT 2.0
Gecko, the Mozilla/Firefox rendering engine, is probably the most advanced/progressive implementation of X/HTML and CSS available
mono is an open-source implementation of.NET
fop was the first XSL-FO implementation available
Products that require high performance, OS or proprietary, may use lower-level languages. Device drivers are a good example of C code used in this way.
Plus many OSS projects are started because someone wants to write a piece of software that does a very specific task, than gradually expanded into a real project. But this eliminates the design phase (even if we allow that most OSS projects have one) which will not lead to improved software.
If the argument that you are making is that organic development is less effective than traditional design methodologies, that will inevitably lead to a discussion of the merits of Extreme Programming (XP), which I believe is beyond the scope of even this long Slashdot thread. Suffice it to say that many great minds have debated this issue already.
...your whole original post...
You seem to have confused me with the original poster. My previous post was my first foray into this discussion.
...who don't care about facts when they don't fit their arguments...
The trouble here is that you offer no facts at all. Your assertions are all based on limited personal experience and preconceptions.
...I still think my original post was an accurate critique of yours.
My observation was directed at your reply, which commited the same infractions you used to disparage the original poster.
I consider the spam emails which are so convoluted that you can barely read them to be a more valuable use of bandwidth than anything you've said.
And yet not quite worthless enough to ignore. Are we to infer that your time is worth less than spam?;)
Most OSS software is written with little to no thought to creating elegant code, writing it so that it will fit together with a larger system, etc.
Can you back that up at all? My experience is that people who do things for their own fulfillment (whether software, woodworking, or haberdashery) tend to take more personal pride in their craft than paid assembly-line workers. This is a generalization, of course.
Hey, speaking of inability to argue points well, can't you OSS fanatics respond to any criticism of your religion with something other than calling people MS apologists or fanboys or calling what they have to say propaganda?
Can't you respond to any criticism of your MS views without calling people OSS fanatics or mentioning OSS religion?
Your post has absolutely no useful or interesting information. You just denounce someone because they don't degree with you, and you act self righteous about it. It doesn't bother you to spew this waste of storage bytes and bandwidth?
Sure, Firefox has better features, but are they features that Mr. Average User needs?
Yes!
Just because they can't articulate the specifics, I'd say most users would appreciate faster, thinner, more responsive and adaptive pages. Maybe Mr. Average User has never heard of CSS 2.1, but I'd bet that stylesheets that are about half the size of current IE-bloated workaround code would appeal to him. I'd also bet that sites with more attractive and engaging interfaces thanks to PNG transparency support would be more successful. Not having to add big, kludgy workarounds for IE's lousy subset of HTML, CSS, and DOM also lowers costs and dramatically improves development efficiency, reducing the cost and time requirements of site improvements, and simplifies debugging. Users tend to like that.
Microsoft agrees, too. That's why they are adding these features to Firefox Lite (IE7). Of course the jarringly different interface means that IE6 to Firefox conversion is likely to be smoother than upgrading IE6 to IE7.
So, free software is not great? Why? I am Mac-ambivalent, but feel free to sweep all of us into a ridiculous generalization.
Microsoft is not inherently bad. I think there are many people there who do really good things. However, these are rarely the ones that make strategic decisions. I'd like, for example, to see MS crush Quicken, e.g., as I think Intuit is guilty of some pretty anticompetitive and lousy behavior. I think SQL Server brought a quality database to small and medium businesses. However, Internet Explorer has made my professional life (web engineering) much harder than Netscape 4 ever did. IE also displays MS's rapacious nature more sharply than many other products because, once the market was flooded and locked, as many predicted, the IE team dissolved, and no further "innovation" happened. It will be difficult for MS to overcome this bitter slap in the face.
...IE itself (rendering engine not included) is not integrated in any way at all,...
I would say that the linkage between iexplore.exe (the browser) and explorer.exe (the OS shell) is most certainly integrated. When the browser spins out of control, the entire shell is affected (nonresponsive). This is demonstrable if you feel this is merely a conspiracy theory.
teaching critical thinking, particularly avoiding overgeneralizations based on alarmist reporting
paying these certified competent teachers a living wage, without constantly bitching about property tax increases that are dwarfed by what we spend on French (freedom) fries alone
Or: clueful enough to want something other than IE, stuck with an IE-only intranet or extranet, supporting users that don't understand the difference between the browsers, and without a training budget to explain when to use which browser.
Not so slim, I'd bet.
Plus: managers have heard of Netscape; Firefox is starting to register, but some of them still consider the open source thing unsustainable/unreliable/scary/distasteful.
Re:Why do you need a switch for Render Engine?
on
Netscape 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Many users don't understand the distinction.
This allows corporate users to use a Gecko engine for safety, while transparently supporting an IE-only intranet.
Anyone notice the Firefox clue on Jeopardy! last night?
The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought `42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story.
The arrival of the Golgafrinchams may not have been unforeseen by a computer able to deduce the existance of rice pudding and income tax before the databanks were connected up.
Arthur and Ford worked it out with the scrabble bag on prehistoric Earth: "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?"... "I always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."
And the Reason for the Answer: "We apologise for the inconvenience."
That's fine, but the reason I brought up China in the first place was to provide an example of a region where "intellectual" "property" law is largely ignored. They may be moving in a Capitalist direction, but they aren't there yet, particularly in terms of an information economy.
The only way you can treat songs like toasters is if *everyone* cooperates. If any hardware vendors, driver authors, electronics companies, distributors, governments, or local law enforcement fail to play ball, data escapes.
My experience, which is not necessarily representative, has been that acedemic institutions need to be extremely resourceful, given their pitifully limited resources. That may be grounded in my particular institutions of attendance, though.
Capitalism: Despite my vocal frustration, our positions appear to overlap.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious; what makes you say this? This may be true for the script kiddies out there, but aren't brighter hackers (of the sort that find the problems in the first place) more likely to target their attacks to more specific/profitable victims, making them far less detectable?
The Federal Reserve takes it off.
How much more national can it be than that?
Why? Brianiac: NetApplications report on Firefox stats
IDG has acknowledge the problem: Brianiac: IDG accepts criticism of Firefox stats article
Why? Brianiac: NetApplications report on Firefox stats
IDG has acknowledge the problem: Brianiac: IDG accepts criticism of Firefox stats article
Even if they wait to launch when they support non-proprietary browsers, they've come at the problem the wrong way round. It's far simpler to start with a standards-based site, then add all the kludgy hacks IE requires.
You assail the elegance employed by a huge group of programmers, then dismiss the craft as a simple commodity. You can't have it both ways.
If your assertion is purely about the quality of the product, then no--this is the salient metric, the whole point of the discussion. This is equivocation.
OK, but you can't really use gut feelings as evidence. If you wish to make a point, you really do need to be more specific.
This is anecdotal evidence, which carries the risk of generalizing on too little evidence.
A claim of this magnitude ("huge") requires several examples, but you give none. In fact, this is completely counter to my own experience. Many OSS projects, in fact, exist purely to demonstrate, showcase, or test new technologies.
Products that require high performance, OS or proprietary, may use lower-level languages. Device drivers are a good example of C code used in this way.
If the argument that you are making is that organic development is less effective than traditional design methodologies, that will inevitably lead to a discussion of the merits of Extreme Programming (XP), which I believe is beyond the scope of even this long Slashdot thread. Suffice it to say that many great minds have debated this issue already.
You seem to have confused me with the original poster. My previous post was my first foray into this discussion.
The trouble here is that you offer no facts at all. Your assertions are all based on limited personal experience and preconceptions.
My observation was directed at your reply, which commited the same infractions you used to disparage the original poster.
And yet not quite worthless enough to ignore. Are we to infer that your time is worth less than spam? ;)
Can you back that up at all? My experience is that people who do things for their own fulfillment (whether software, woodworking, or haberdashery) tend to take more personal pride in their craft than paid assembly-line workers. This is a generalization, of course.
Can't you respond to any criticism of your MS views without calling people OSS fanatics or mentioning OSS religion?
*Ahem* Did you preview your own post?
Yes!
Just because they can't articulate the specifics, I'd say most users would appreciate faster, thinner, more responsive and adaptive pages. Maybe Mr. Average User has never heard of CSS 2.1, but I'd bet that stylesheets that are about half the size of current IE-bloated workaround code would appeal to him. I'd also bet that sites with more attractive and engaging interfaces thanks to PNG transparency support would be more successful. Not having to add big, kludgy workarounds for IE's lousy subset of HTML, CSS, and DOM also lowers costs and dramatically improves development efficiency, reducing the cost and time requirements of site improvements, and simplifies debugging. Users tend to like that.
Microsoft agrees, too. That's why they are adding these features to Firefox Lite (IE7). Of course the jarringly different interface means that IE6 to Firefox conversion is likely to be smoother than upgrading IE6 to IE7.
Repeat after me: Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Saving Time; Not Daylight Savings Time.
Daylight saving time
(no body, please move along)
Arrogance is also very entertaining.
So, free software is not great? Why? I am Mac-ambivalent, but feel free to sweep all of us into a ridiculous generalization.
Microsoft is not inherently bad. I think there are many people there who do really good things. However, these are rarely the ones that make strategic decisions. I'd like, for example, to see MS crush Quicken, e.g., as I think Intuit is guilty of some pretty anticompetitive and lousy behavior. I think SQL Server brought a quality database to small and medium businesses. However, Internet Explorer has made my professional life (web engineering) much harder than Netscape 4 ever did. IE also displays MS's rapacious nature more sharply than many other products because, once the market was flooded and locked, as many predicted, the IE team dissolved, and no further "innovation" happened. It will be difficult for MS to overcome this bitter slap in the face.
This is not a religious or baseless attitude, but the result of bad treatment. Brianiac: IE7: Clearly a sign of desperation
I would say that the linkage between iexplore.exe (the browser) and explorer.exe (the OS shell) is most certainly integrated. When the browser spins out of control, the entire shell is affected (nonresponsive). This is demonstrable if you feel this is merely a conspiracy theory.
Add:
Or: clueful enough to want something other than IE, stuck with an IE-only intranet or extranet, supporting users that don't understand the difference between the browsers, and without a training budget to explain when to use which browser.
Not so slim, I'd bet.
Plus: managers have heard of Netscape; Firefox is starting to register, but some of them still consider the open source thing unsustainable/unreliable/scary/distasteful.
Many users don't understand the distinction.
This allows corporate users to use a Gecko engine for safety, while transparently supporting an IE-only intranet.
Anyone notice the Firefox clue on Jeopardy! last night?
Wikipedia has more on 42 than is healthy.
For more information, consult your local library.
The arrival of the Golgafrinchams may not have been unforeseen by a computer able to deduce the existance of rice pudding and income tax before the databanks were connected up.
If both were known, the universe would vanish and instantly be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
Of note: in base 13, 6 × 9 = 42
Arthur and Ford worked it out with the scrabble bag on prehistoric Earth: "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" ... "I always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."
And the Reason for the Answer: "We apologise for the inconvenience."
Of course you mean ActiveX, not VBScript. JavaScript could do the same thing (actually JScript, the ActiveX-enabled version of JavaScript).
That's fine, but the reason I brought up China in the first place was to provide an example of a region where "intellectual" "property" law is largely ignored. They may be moving in a Capitalist direction, but they aren't there yet, particularly in terms of an information economy. The only way you can treat songs like toasters is if *everyone* cooperates. If any hardware vendors, driver authors, electronics companies, distributors, governments, or local law enforcement fail to play ball, data escapes.
SIGGRAPH: Your point is taken.
:)
My experience, which is not necessarily representative, has been that acedemic institutions need to be extremely resourceful, given their pitifully limited resources. That may be grounded in my particular institutions of attendance, though.
Capitalism: Despite my vocal frustration, our positions appear to overlap.