I have offered to several people to put on a different browser, and make their bookmarks work. I get the dreaded face of 'no' from them.
Wow. You probably know more morons than me, and that's impressive:).
When I hinted people to switch to Firefox -without offering any help about their bookmarks!- it was enough to talk about simple features like tabbed browsing and pop up blocking to see my whole lab switch in mass.
I can't see why Firefox and Thunderbird are not as simple as Outlook and IE. Frankly I think Thunderbird is much more user friendly than Outlook. That's not the problem. The problem is not OO.org vs Word (OO.org is OK for 90% users). Is much more the crappy Gimp vs Photoshop, or NOTHING vs FruityLoops, or NOTHING vs Macromedia Flash, or poor little Inkscape vs Illustrator. The challenge is on professional, large suites, IMHO.
For the everyday family - small office user, Linux is more than ready. If everything you need to do is reading&writing documents - browsing the internet - managing email - IM - chatting - listening to music and viewing videos, well, Linux is there. Do you think it's just nothing? Well,it's just what most computer users need.
Professional users need something different,of course. I wonder why doesn't Adobe port its suites to Linux (or at least support them on WINE). And music editing and production on Linux is still at zero.
It means people aren't scared of RIAA-MPAA hyenas and that more and more art and information is shared on the Internet for all of us to enjoy. Good.
Anyway I think, given the bad legal situation of file sharing in USA (and soon in Europe), that we should begin to use more secure P2P clients. The eDonkey network is easily traceable, let alone networks like DC or SoulSeek. I'd like to try MUTE or FreeNet, but I'm not fully sure about how hard their security is, and about the possible drawbacks. What do you think about?
Hmmm...Is the parent a nice molecular-biology troll or just a gem of ignorance mixed with self-confidence?
"Because there's very little in the virus that is guaranteed to be common to ALL instances of said virus, it is hard to see how immunity could exist, even in theory."
The resistance mutation depends from the absence of a particular chemokine receptor on human white blood cells. In principle, the HIV virus could use another receptor to enter. In practice it's quite improbable the virus can mutate his whole capsid proteins to get advantage of a totally new receptor.
"Then, you have other problems. HIV is detected in a number of ways, but probably the most common way is to detect the antibodies to the virus. This causes an obvious problem. If your immune system is damaged, in some way, it may not be able to detect the virus and/or produce antibodies to it. Either way, any technique for detecting HIV through the antibodies would fail."
You obviously have no grasp of immunology. HIV infects primarily subsets of T cells. They are not B cells, that produce soluble antibodies. B cells are not attacked by HIV,therefore you argument is bullshit.
(In fact, B cells are indirectly affected by HIV, but only in late stages of AIDS disease.)
"So much so that they could fight the disease and not even need to generate antibodies to do so."
You have no grasp of immunology,it's obvious now. Your body doesn't "feel the need" for antibodies.It just produces them when encounters an antigen. In fact, you probably already have cells with anti-HIV antibodies: they're just very,very few and are not activated.(Wanna know why? RTFM, i.e. a molecular immunology textbook)
"In theory, since we don't actually know in practice."
We know. Check other/. comments and what I wrote before.
"Provided the self-destruct triggers faster than the virus can spread"
It seems you know nothing about virology and apoptosis too...
"...you're probably not going to live very long anyway, and your quality of life isn't going to be noticably better than those with the disease. In fact, it would probably be a whole lot worse.
But, hey, if that's what these two women want for their life, that's their problem.
"
If these women were immunodeficient, physicians should have noticed it immediately. Such a severe immunodeficience is, like you seem to understand, practically incompatible with life.
Well,it's amazing, but it's not the first time i see it.
I work in molecular biology. Recently we started doing experiments with so-called Matrigel. This is purified extracellular matrix from mice tumours. It's a natural environment to grow endothelial cells and study the development of blood vessels. This is by no means a mysterious substance - thousand of labs buy it and use it every day.
Well, Matrigel works exactly the same way the substance in the article does. It is fluid around 0, but rapidly freezes at -20 and rapidly becomes solid at room temperature. And it is fully reversible. This also makes the substance a bitch to manipulate -you pick up with the pipette,and it becomes solid inside the pipette before you can transfer it!
Still, it is amazing to mimic such a behaviour in a simple solution instead than in the tremendous proteins-and-sugars mess that's Matrigel.
I actually have used FreeBSD. I know it's of course possible to run every kind of program on BSD.
The fact is, there is no problem with *BSD, unless you lack the bandwidth. I had a FreeBSD box at home when I still had no Internet connection at home (Having had 56K wouldn't have helped that much,anyway). It was a pain, since I had no chance to use the ports collection,and the BSD cd's had only a limited choice of packages. I didn't figure out how to obtain a coherent collection of BSD packages,unless I downloaded all (in my lab) of them one by one.
With for example Debian,I just went in the lab and download the cd-rom images. I burned 'em and brought 'em home. Much simpler.
If there actually are "Free(Net,Open)BSD" additional (unofficial) cd-roms, ok, that's my own fault to find them. Let me know.
You seem to forget there are also people that just love to have a large choice of programs for the same task. I'm one of these people : in fact, I first got fascinated by Linux because I looked at the impressive number of packages there were in Debian.
I usually run mplayer, but sometimes xine is better suited to my tastes. Having both Firefox and Konqueror is pure gold, depending what kind of things are you browsing (casual browsing=Firefox , work browsing=lots of pdf docs+frequent interaction with my files=Konqueror). Even more than one text editor is ok, since I can use the fully featured Kate when programming and gvim as a "very advanced notepad" (Yes,I know both are not the true-geek-choices).
For me, OSS is choice and flexibility. Perhaps the monolithic approach of the BSD's is what is leaving them behind (of user base, not technically,where they're probably equal or superior) the confused,fat penguin.
"Linux is in many respects amazing. But as a desktop operating system, it stills stinks, despite the vast quantity of effort put into trying to change that."
(Oh,the dearest,oldest of all/. trolls...)
Quite odd. It's 16 months today I'm using a Linux desktop for almost everything people do on their desktops.And no,I'm no uberhacker or developer.
Just an anecdote. A weekend ago two friends of mine came to my home. They are absolutely no tech people,and they always used Windows. After a while they were checkin' email and stuff on my Linux PC, they begun ask me about Linux,sayin' "hey!it looks cool!" "how does it works?" "how can I try it?" "seems nicer than win". In a couple of hours they were literally begging me for havin' a Knoppix cd.
I totally agree with you. Perhaps we don't need another program, I think the idea of a PS-like-mode for the Gimp would be at least a good start.
But I wonder : Why there are *at least* 4 good free (beer/speech) word processors (OO.org Writer, AbiWord, KWord, Lyx) , 3 vector graphics programs (Sodipodi, Inkscape, OO.org Draw) and so on... and only ONE decent free image manipulation program (let alone the ImageMagick, it is a good tool for many things but definitvely NOT an usable photo manipulation thing)?
Money spent on science is not wasted. And the less practical is the science, the more I'm sure that money is not wasted.
I work in science (molecular biology), and I don't do it to help people (although I love if my research can help,of course). I do it primarily because I want to understand the Universe. I do it primarily because I think one of the most important, amazing and noble things humankind can do is trying to understand the universe we have the luck to live within. It is at least as noble as helping the poorest. If not noblest, because we will all die (poor or not poor). But knowledge will last.
If someone has a psychosomatic problem, hasn't he a problem? Of course he has. Why do you care if relief for him is cutting off that nasty smells? Of course he can go to a psychiatrist, but in the way why should he suffer hell?
Sensibility to volatile compounds is a rare allergy, but it is true. It's not some kind of queer twist. There are people that cannot dress anything but pure,white cotton without having serious, harmful allergies.
I'm allergic,with asthma. My condition is much milder than him, but I indeed suffer inside new cars, for example.
I hate politically correct,so it's nice you joke. But,after,try help him. (I have no clue,sorry).
I use Windows XP at work and Linux at home (Mandrake 10) and at my parent's home (a shiny new Slackware 10). And I never,ever saw a better gui than KDE. (GNOME people,please don't bash me now). Seriously. Not even Aqua. The winxp gui is slow and sucks. It looks like it has been drawn by Teletubbies. No matter how cool (?) skins you put on it. It will suck. Forever. KDE 3.2+ is quite fast (anyway,not slower than XP) and it is much,much more easy and overall aestethically pleasant.
When I let XP people see a Knoppix or Mandrake KDE 3.x desktop, they are simply shocked. "Wow!And they told me linux interfaces sucked...".
I remember it was spring 2003 when I pondered switching to Linux for months. I was almost convinced, but...Then I plugged in Knoppix, and I saw THAT desktop.
I installed Mandrake the day after.
(p.s. - Syllable is a lovely project, but I think that we will be much more rewarded by pushing on X-window desktop interfaces -they're cross-platform,too!- instead of reinventing the wheel again)
Really. No jokes. All/.ers that are UK parents should not only teaching the kids the value of open exchange of ideas. They should also go to the school and *loudly complain* against this if their kids are exposed to such disgusting political propaganda.
They could also organize counter-lessons, both in school with the aid of clever teachers or outside. We must reject this now, before it's too late.
Yes. But the peer review process is *free*. No one pays my professor to peer review a ton of articles every month. But he does. And nonetheless my university *pays* for the subscription to the journals he serves as a peer reviewer.
Peer review is at the core of scientific quality. But I think it won't be harmed by open access to scientific papers/journals. I think governments would spend much less by paying peer reviewers and servers to store papers in electronic formats, than financing a thousand redundant subscriptions to journals for every academic institution.
I think it will be a bad flop (yeah, children hate things made for children),but anyway it's a diseducative move.
Children have to learn computing on real computers. Real computers are NOT difficult for children (expecially now),and there was a/. story about 3-y.o. people using Linux;)
Anyway,I remember I learned computers when I was 5, on my dad's VIC-20. I remember I was amazed I could tell that machine what to do!. I just typed:
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
and I stared looking that machine that did what I asked it...Ok,I asked something stupid,but I felt powerful! And I had just learned what a loop is...
Later (when I was 6-7) I learned to POKE around...and,guys,there were *worlds* in the memory of that machine! I remember I thought I would have "decrypted" the odd character noise that happened with some POKE command...
The fact is with that computer I learned how to program and how computers were made, seamlessly, and having fun. Because it was a real machine, and because I had to program to make it work. I felt powerful.
Therefore, wanna build a children-oriented computer? Just do it :
-Install Linux (Mandrake -or any other well-done KDE/Gnome desktop will work)(oh,I know this advice is pure mod-gold;) )
-Install all xmms/mplayer codecs etc.
-DON'T install all games you can think of : tell him/her how to find and install them!
-Give your child a good Python tutorial and tell him/her "Can't you find that game?You can do YOUR GAME.Now."
It's lovely someone wants to develop and fork something so exotic like an electronic voting system.
I just hope some government will understand that it's NECESSARY for such software to be FULLY Open Source, to guarantee democracy. How can I trust a device I don't know what is REALLY doing with my votes?
(And if someone is scared by the fact someone can maliciously change the program in the local voting machines just before the election...well,it's enough for THAT election to use a freezed code with a definite SHA1 or MD5 checksum...isn't it?)
I'm not too much inside the XUL thing, but AFAIK you can use it for rapidly creating plugins and extensions to the browser. And OK,this is cool. But why in the hell it should be automatically loaded and executed? The pop-up dialogue you propose is IMHO useless. How can the user know if it's a Good XUL interface or an Evil XUL interface? Everyone would click OK,and get somehow spoofed.
And not just for the bug itself (that probably will be fixed quite rapidly). There are two issues behind this.
(1).The problem was known 4 years ago, but it was marked confidential. I'm not familiar with BugZilla,so I didn't even know there could be a "confidential" bug. This is the antithesis of Open Source philosophy. This is pure security-through-obscurity, in pure M$ style. If the bug wasn't "confidential",I'm sure we should have seen this fixed years ago.
I just hope most of the other open source/free software projects I rely on every day (Linux,KDE,Mplayer,Kile,Thunderbird,Nicotine and so on...) don't follow such a moron habit.
(2)How can the browser load XUL code and use it without warning? This is not a bug: this looks more like IE-like flawed design. Correct design shouldn't even *read* any data of this kind, let alone running it and let it deface the browser itself!
The Mozilla family of browsers/mail clients is still a crew of wonderful programs,and I'm proud of using them. But they will rapidly become IE-like crap, if they continue this way.
Think you have missed the point.
Ok, writing portable C or C++ needs some effort. But what about Python,PHP,Perl,Ruby and so on?
I code Python, and I found it to be amazingly portable and self-consistent. Exactly the way you want it -write on a machine to use on a completely different machine. I know the same holds for other interpreted languages. Python,PHP and Ruby are also much more coder-friendly than Java. Sure there are occasions in which Java is needed (probably because it is best supported and has more ready-to-go libraries), but I don't think it's the last word about portability. And Java crunches too much memory.
And what about the.NET thing? I don't know very much about it, but now that the OSS community can rely on Mono, it's getting hot, isn't it?
Finally, I never found a decent Java desktop application. Why?
Slashdot Mirror
I have offered to several people to put on a different browser, and make their bookmarks work. I get the dreaded face of 'no' from them.
Wow. You probably know more morons than me, and that's impressive :).
When I hinted people to switch to Firefox -without offering any help about their bookmarks!- it was enough to talk about simple features like tabbed browsing and pop up blocking to see my whole lab switch in mass.
I can't see why Firefox and Thunderbird are not as simple as Outlook and IE. Frankly I think Thunderbird is much more user friendly than Outlook. That's not the problem. The problem is not OO.org vs Word (OO.org is OK for 90% users). Is much more the crappy Gimp vs Photoshop, or NOTHING vs FruityLoops, or NOTHING vs Macromedia Flash, or poor little Inkscape vs Illustrator. The challenge is on professional, large suites, IMHO.
For the everyday family - small office user, Linux is more than ready. If everything you need to do is reading&writing documents - browsing the internet - managing email - IM - chatting - listening to music and viewing videos, well, Linux is there. Do you think it's just nothing? Well,it's just what most computer users need.
Professional users need something different,of course. I wonder why doesn't Adobe port its suites to Linux (or at least support them on WINE). And music editing and production on Linux is still at zero.
It means people aren't scared of RIAA-MPAA hyenas and that more and more art and information is shared on the Internet for all of us to enjoy. Good. Anyway I think, given the bad legal situation of file sharing in USA (and soon in Europe), that we should begin to use more secure P2P clients. The eDonkey network is easily traceable, let alone networks like DC or SoulSeek. I'd like to try MUTE or FreeNet, but I'm not fully sure about how hard their security is, and about the possible drawbacks. What do you think about?
And I can easily access http://www.georgewbush.com. Note I use no U.S. proxy.
(And it doesn't crash my firefox).
Hmmm...Is the parent a nice molecular-biology troll or just a gem of ignorance mixed with self-confidence?
"Because there's very little in the virus that is guaranteed to be common to ALL instances of said virus, it is hard to see how immunity could exist, even in theory."
The resistance mutation depends from the absence of a particular chemokine receptor on human white blood cells. In principle, the HIV virus could use another receptor to enter. In practice it's quite improbable the virus can mutate his whole capsid proteins to get advantage of a totally new receptor.
"Then, you have other problems. HIV is detected in a number of ways, but probably the most common way is to detect the antibodies to the virus. This causes an obvious problem. If your immune system is damaged, in some way, it may not be able to detect the virus and/or produce antibodies to it. Either way, any technique for detecting HIV through the antibodies would fail."
You obviously have no grasp of immunology. HIV infects primarily subsets of T cells. They are not B cells, that produce soluble antibodies. B cells are not attacked by HIV,therefore you argument is bullshit.
(In fact, B cells are indirectly affected by HIV, but only in late stages of AIDS disease.)
"So much so that they could fight the disease and not even need to generate antibodies to do so."
You have no grasp of immunology,it's obvious now. Your body doesn't "feel the need" for antibodies.It just produces them when encounters an antigen. In fact, you probably already have cells with anti-HIV antibodies: they're just very,very few and are not activated.(Wanna know why? RTFM, i.e. a molecular immunology textbook)
"In theory, since we don't actually know in practice."
We know. Check other /. comments and what I wrote before.
"Provided the self-destruct triggers faster than the virus can spread"
It seems you know nothing about virology and apoptosis too...
"...you're probably not going to live very long anyway, and your quality of life isn't going to be noticably better than those with the disease. In fact, it would probably be a whole lot worse. But, hey, if that's what these two women want for their life, that's their problem. "
If these women were immunodeficient, physicians should have noticed it immediately. Such a severe immunodeficience is, like you seem to understand, practically incompatible with life.
Well,it's amazing, but it's not the first time i see it.
I work in molecular biology. Recently we started doing experiments with so-called Matrigel. This is purified extracellular matrix from mice tumours. It's a natural environment to grow endothelial cells and study the development of blood vessels. This is by no means a mysterious substance - thousand of labs buy it and use it every day.
Well, Matrigel works exactly the same way the substance in the article does. It is fluid around 0, but rapidly freezes at -20 and rapidly becomes solid at room temperature. And it is fully reversible. This also makes the substance a bitch to manipulate -you pick up with the pipette,and it becomes solid inside the pipette before you can transfer it!
Still, it is amazing to mimic such a behaviour in a simple solution instead than in the tremendous proteins-and-sugars mess that's Matrigel.
It surely just shows my ignorance, but...
I actually have used FreeBSD. I know it's of course possible to run every kind of program on BSD.
The fact is, there is no problem with *BSD, unless you lack the bandwidth. I had a FreeBSD box at home when I still had no Internet connection at home (Having had 56K wouldn't have helped that much,anyway). It was a pain, since I had no chance to use the ports collection,and the BSD cd's had only a limited choice of packages. I didn't figure out how to obtain a coherent collection of BSD packages,unless I downloaded all (in my lab) of them one by one.
With for example Debian,I just went in the lab and download the cd-rom images. I burned 'em and brought 'em home. Much simpler.
If there actually are "Free(Net,Open)BSD" additional (unofficial) cd-roms, ok, that's my own fault to find them. Let me know.
You seem to forget there are also people that just love to have a large choice of programs for the same task. I'm one of these people : in fact, I first got fascinated by Linux because I looked at the impressive number of packages there were in Debian.
I usually run mplayer, but sometimes xine is better suited to my tastes. Having both Firefox and Konqueror is pure gold, depending what kind of things are you browsing (casual browsing=Firefox , work browsing=lots of pdf docs+frequent interaction with my files=Konqueror). Even more than one text editor is ok, since I can use the fully featured Kate when programming and gvim as a "very advanced notepad" (Yes,I know both are not the true-geek-choices).
For me, OSS is choice and flexibility. Perhaps the monolithic approach of the BSD's is what is leaving them behind (of user base, not technically,where they're probably equal or superior) the confused,fat penguin.
"Linux is in many respects amazing. But as a desktop operating system, it stills stinks, despite the vast quantity of effort put into trying to change that."
(Oh,the dearest,oldest of all /. trolls...)
Quite odd. It's 16 months today I'm using a Linux desktop for almost everything people do on their desktops.And no,I'm no uberhacker or developer.
Just an anecdote. A weekend ago two friends of mine came to my home. They are absolutely no tech people,and they always used Windows. After a while they were checkin' email and stuff on my Linux PC, they begun ask me about Linux ,sayin' "hey!it looks cool!" "how does it works?" "how can I try it?" "seems nicer than win". In a couple of hours they were literally begging me for havin' a Knoppix cd.
I totally agree with you. Perhaps we don't need another program, I think the idea of a PS-like-mode for the Gimp would be at least a good start.
But I wonder : Why there are *at least* 4 good free (beer/speech) word processors (OO.org Writer, AbiWord, KWord, Lyx) , 3 vector graphics programs (Sodipodi, Inkscape, OO.org Draw) and so on... and only ONE decent free image manipulation program (let alone the ImageMagick, it is a good tool for many things but definitvely NOT an usable photo manipulation thing)?
I just hate that kind of reasoning.
Money spent on science is not wasted. And the less practical is the science, the more I'm sure that money is not wasted.
I work in science (molecular biology), and I don't do it to help people (although I love if my research can help,of course). I do it primarily because I want to understand the Universe. I do it primarily because I think one of the most important, amazing and noble things humankind can do is trying to understand the universe we have the luck to live within. It is at least as noble as helping the poorest. If not noblest, because we will all die (poor or not poor). But knowledge will last.
If someone has a psychosomatic problem, hasn't he a problem? Of course he has. Why do you care if relief for him is cutting off that nasty smells? Of course he can go to a psychiatrist, but in the way why should he suffer hell?
Sensibility to volatile compounds is a rare allergy, but it is true. It's not some kind of queer twist. There are people that cannot dress anything but pure,white cotton without having serious, harmful allergies.
I'm allergic,with asthma. My condition is much milder than him, but I indeed suffer inside new cars, for example.
I hate politically correct,so it's nice you joke. But,after,try help him. (I have no clue,sorry).
(1). What will happen when the lake water will be warmed up? Ok,it will perhaps take a long time,but...
(2). How does the energy required for pumping / distributing the water and maintaining pipelines and machinery compares with electrical conditioneers?
Said that, it looks like a nice idea.I use Windows XP at work and Linux at home (Mandrake 10) and at my parent's home (a shiny new Slackware 10).
And I never,ever saw a better gui than KDE. (GNOME people,please don't bash me now). Seriously. Not even Aqua. The winxp gui is slow and sucks. It looks like it has been drawn by Teletubbies. No matter how cool (?) skins you put on it. It will suck. Forever. KDE 3.2+ is quite fast (anyway,not slower than XP) and it is much,much more easy and overall aestethically pleasant.
When I let XP people see a Knoppix or Mandrake KDE 3.x desktop, they are simply shocked. "Wow!And they told me linux interfaces sucked...".
I remember it was spring 2003 when I pondered switching to Linux for months. I was almost convinced, but...Then I plugged in Knoppix, and I saw THAT desktop.
I installed Mandrake the day after.
(p.s. - Syllable is a lovely project, but I think that we will be much more rewarded by pushing on X-window desktop interfaces -they're cross-platform,too!- instead of reinventing the wheel again)
Really. No jokes. All /.ers that are UK parents should not only teaching the kids the value of open exchange of ideas. They should also go to the school and *loudly complain* against this if their kids are exposed to such disgusting political propaganda.
They could also organize counter-lessons, both in school with the aid of clever teachers or outside. We must reject this now, before it's too late.
Yes. But the peer review process is *free*. No one pays my professor to peer review a ton of articles every month. But he does. And nonetheless my university *pays* for the subscription to the journals he serves as a peer reviewer.
Peer review is at the core of scientific quality. But I think it won't be harmed by open access to scientific papers/journals. I think governments would spend much less by paying peer reviewers and servers to store papers in electronic formats, than financing a thousand redundant subscriptions to journals for every academic institution.
I think it will be a bad flop (yeah, children hate things made for children),but anyway it's a diseducative move.
Children have to learn computing on real computers. Real computers are NOT difficult for children (expecially now),and there was a /. story about 3-y.o. people using Linux ;)
Anyway,I remember I learned computers when I was 5, on my dad's VIC-20. I remember I was amazed I could tell that machine what to do!. I just typed :
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
and I stared looking that machine that did what I asked it...Ok,I asked something stupid,but I felt powerful! And I had just learned what a loop is...
Later (when I was 6-7) I learned to POKE around...and,guys,there were *worlds* in the memory of that machine! I remember I thought I would have "decrypted" the odd character noise that happened with some POKE command...
The fact is with that computer I learned how to program and how computers were made, seamlessly, and having fun. Because it was a real machine, and because I had to program to make it work. I felt powerful.
Therefore, wanna build a children-oriented computer? Just do it :
;) )
-Install Linux (Mandrake -or any other well-done KDE/Gnome desktop will work)(oh,I know this advice is pure mod-gold
-Install all xmms/mplayer codecs etc.
-DON'T install all games you can think of : tell him/her how to find and install them!
-Give your child a good Python tutorial and tell him/her "Can't you find that game?You can do YOUR GAME.Now."
It's lovely someone wants to develop and fork something so exotic like an electronic voting system.
I just hope some government will understand that it's NECESSARY for such software to be FULLY Open Source, to guarantee democracy. How can I trust a device I don't know what is REALLY doing with my votes?
(And if someone is scared by the fact someone can maliciously change the program in the local voting machines just before the election...well,it's enough for THAT election to use a freezed code with a definite SHA1 or MD5 checksum...isn't it?)
I'm not too much inside the XUL thing, but AFAIK you can use it for rapidly creating plugins and extensions to the browser. And OK,this is cool. But why in the hell it should be automatically loaded and executed? The pop-up dialogue you propose is IMHO useless. How can the user know if it's a Good XUL interface or an Evil XUL interface? Everyone would click OK,and get somehow spoofed.
And not just for the bug itself (that probably will be fixed quite rapidly). There are two issues behind this.
(1).The problem was known 4 years ago, but it was marked confidential. I'm not familiar with BugZilla,so I didn't even know there could be a "confidential" bug. This is the antithesis of Open Source philosophy. This is pure security-through-obscurity, in pure M$ style. If the bug wasn't "confidential",I'm sure we should have seen this fixed years ago.
I just hope most of the other open source/free software projects I rely on every day (Linux,KDE,Mplayer,Kile,Thunderbird,Nicotine and so on...) don't follow such a moron habit.
(2)How can the browser load XUL code and use it without warning? This is not a bug: this looks more like IE-like flawed design. Correct design shouldn't even *read* any data of this kind, let alone running it and let it deface the browser itself!
The Mozilla family of browsers/mail clients is still a crew of wonderful programs,and I'm proud of using them. But they will rapidly become IE-like crap, if they continue this way.
I can't see why can't you use some quicker language, like Python, Ruby or PHP...
Think you have missed the point. Ok, writing portable C or C++ needs some effort. But what about Python,PHP,Perl,Ruby and so on?
I code Python, and I found it to be amazingly portable and self-consistent. Exactly the way you want it -write on a machine to use on a completely different machine. I know the same holds for other interpreted languages. Python,PHP and Ruby are also much more coder-friendly than Java. Sure there are occasions in which Java is needed (probably because it is best supported and has more ready-to-go libraries), but I don't think it's the last word about portability. And Java crunches too much memory.
And what about the .NET thing? I don't know very much about it, but now that the OSS community can rely on Mono, it's getting hot, isn't it?
Finally, I never found a decent Java desktop application. Why?