Yet how long has this massive fault been sitting there waiting for the first person to discover it? How do we know that the public acknowledgement of it was the first actual discovery of it?
We don't. But you'd be surprised how many of the "good guys" do bother to go through looking for problems, in some quite thorough fashion. There will be times when the bad guys have the vulnerability first, but I really don't think it will be that often, maybe 20% of the time.
(You might argue that people who use loan sharks tend to be those in desperate situations and who struggle to get loans from more legitimate financial institutions --- but those problems exist for those people regardless of whether or not loan sharks exist - the existence of the loan sharks only adds options for the desperate individual, it doesn't remove any options. Taking away the loan sharks wouldn't somehow cause desperate situations to disappear and wouldn't make financial institutions more willing to lend money to high-risk groups.)
Because people use them and end up in a worse situation. And yes, they know this, but they still do it, because it's easier to worry about owing $x next Saturday than $3x in a month.
Marketing is (supposed to be) about simply informing people about your products. I certainly don't like marketing that interrupts and intrudes ("I'll look for info when I want the product, dammit") or that is deceptive, but that is not a problem with marketing per se, just a problem with how most modern marketing happens to be implemented.
Marketing is about doing whatever is necessary to maximise the sales of your product. Informing is part of that, but so is persuading and even manipulating.
I appreciate having information available, and oftentimes that information comes from the company itself (e.g. if I buy a printer, I want to know how many pages per minute it can print and at what resolution, what the price is, and the only way to really find out such info is marketing (that's what the printer company's website is).
Point. Passive marketing which doesn't get in my way is useful as long as it isn't deceptive. But it's also less effective than trying to get people who don't want it to buy your printer as well. That's the problem with being in a situation where you're trying to sell a product - it's in your interests to get people to do things they don't want to and that won't benefit them.
How could we possibly ever make purchasing decisions if there was no marketing? We couldn't even buy a simple printer.
You would get the specs in the shop, by law if nothing else, like you have to be told the weight of the meat you're buying. I suspect there are laws about it anyway, given the lengths some companies go to to hide their specs (how many actual pixels does that digital camera have without interpolation? You'll need a magnifying glass to read it).
I'm not sure what you mean. It's not that easy to uninstall searches, but it takes 2 minutes to go find different searches and install them.
There were bugs which made it a lot trickier than it should have been to install new searches last time I used ff. And isn't there one search that you can't change, the default if a domain doesn't exist or something.
Opera installs Google as well, and gets paid for it just like Mozilla.
The minute I notice something where they seem to care more about Google than me I will object. FF feels like it's pushing google at me, so far Opera hasn't.
Mozilla actually tries to follow W3C standards, so other standards-compliant browsers should be pretty close to right, even without testing.
Not really, because Mozilla puts a lot of effort into rendering broken pages well. If the page was written with good html in mind then yes, if it works in Moz it will probably work in most things - but that was the case with IE as well. If it was written in IE html and then modified to persuade it to render properly in ff, not really.
If your goal is to maximize the number of Opera users, no doubt, Firefox is a hindrance. If your goal is to maximize browser choice, it's surely a massive victory.
My goal is to have people using as good browsers as possible, and though firefox is a clear short-term win in that regard, I think ultimately it's going to hurt that aim.
Nothing is going to protect people from the gross stupidity of the occasional web designer. But there are surely less "IE and Mozilla only" sites than there were IE only sites before, especially when some designers thought that building sites around Windows-only ActiveX controls were a good idea.
I had never come across an IE-only site in that sense - maybe designers didn't realise other browsers existed so didn't bother to block them or something. And although they may be crossplatform, mozilla's extra stuff is just as bad from the point of browser lock-in (and there are sites that will give you activex control for IE, some kind of extendy thing for ff, and nothing for anyone else)
Yes, and other people have decided that since you can choose your browser now, it's okay to shop around and sample everything that's out there.
Not really. If it was possible to persuade them to switch to ff, it would have been possible to persuade them to switch to something else if they hadn't switched to ff.
In what way do you think that developing a free, GPL'ed browser and making spinoff income off the fact that people choose to search with Google fails to strike this balance?
If it was just spinoff it wouldn't matter. But it's not just the user's choice - they make money by making Google excessively integrated as shipped, and hard to change. I would prefer they charged directly for the browser than to have other interests more important than those of the user (and demonstrated this by buying opera, before you make a snide comment on how easy it is to take that attitude in theory). It's a very short step from what they're doing now to bundling Gator.
And if you say it's because they've been too aggressive at promoting their product, remember that before Firefox's popularity got off the ground, IE's market share was so towering that most commercial websites were developed and tested with only IE in mind. If Firefox were just another obscure browser with no market share, this would likely still be the case.
Wheras now they are developed and tested with only IE and FF in mind, and anyone else is no better off. In fact worse off, since there are now even less users for Opera, and I've had at least one site that will block browsers other than IE and firefox. Furthermore, I've known users who are now turned off switching - "I tried firefox and didn't like it, I'm sticking with IE from now on".
The native gecko-based browsers (k-melon/camino/galeon etc.) are generally superior (as is unsurprising really, a non-crossplatform version can be better integrated and so do a lot more cool things), and konqueror utterly blows it away IMO.
But there are GPL browsers that are 10x as good that don't get anywhere near as much attention. I don't know any serious hackers who use firefox - some are on mozilla suite, but most have (from what I've seen) moved on to better things.
Oh for God's sake what do you expect, that the Mozilla developers should be "pure" and "untainted" by commercial interests that might "bias" them towards pushing their solutions over others for reasons other than technical?
I wouldn't say expect. But I would certainly think more of them were such the case.
Get over yourself, there just aren't enough programmers willing to live like paupers giving up their lives in some mother theresa style gesture doing volunteer development work while starving and living in the gutter... you can't *make* software for free, programmers not only need money, they tend to demand a lot of it...
There is a balance to be struck. You can do the pauper thing. Or you can be a completely unethical scumbag and make lots and lots of money. Neither of these is the best path.
further it's a free market, the Mozilla Foundation have found a business model that allows them to make money off a free browser and there is nothing wrong with that.
So there's nothing wrong with, say, loan sharks then?
you speak as though marketing itself is some form of evil.
Because it is. It's fundamentally antisocial. You waste the time of others in order to gain something for yourself.
Funny how it's always "other people" we expect to live to insanely idealised standards of devotion to ideologies of untainted technical purity, while for ourselves it's always OK to maximise the income we can earn from our own endeavours.
You don't know shit about how much I earn, how much I work on free software, and what standards I have for what I'll do for money. Don't assume that everyone is like yourself.
It implies they have more motivation to market, to exaggerate their features, to astroturf even. And I wonder if they are - they appear to have an unreasonable amount of support on sites like this for how good their browser actually is.
Statistically speaking, that's exactly what has happened in the past with various degrees of success (Beta, Memory Sticks, Mini-discs, UMD, etc.)
Didn't with CDs though. And that was pretty much the only time they tried as part of a consortium (joint thing with Phillips) rather than on their own - and that's what's happening this time.
I'm now of the opinion that the "managed" languages are a short-term abberation, unless they adopt an ANDF type "freeze" approach. That is where the bytecodes are pre-compiled once into machine code, just like a traditional compiler.
.Net is at least capable of doing this, and it does give a decent performance improvement. Personally I think it should overtake the JVM - more emphasis on choice of languages (of which java is one), and it seems to be generally improved.
You can get a reasonably decent CPU with the source available, though at the rate everyone's moving to x86 that may well soon cease to be the case. If you do go for FPGAs then yes, the performance hit will be huge - the processor I mentioned is nearly 15 years old, but the last discussion here still concluded it would be pretty impossible to implement it in an FPGA. But I'd hope there would be enough a market to make it worth doing some "proper" manufacturing of "clean" CPUs.
Why not hardware? I have the source code to the processor in the machine my webserver's running on. It's entirely useless to me since I don't have a chip fab, but I'm sure someone's done something cool with it.
I think using the CPUID for that is still pretty dumb - there are still huge differences between different types of AMD cpus. Anything as close to the hardware as bios updater is going to need vendor/family/model numbers rather than the cpuid, and an optimisation at the level of amd/intel is probably not worth bothering with.
I can see an easy way Intel could make it hurt - rather than going by the CPUID, make things run slow on any processor which supports 3dnow. That's something which would very much hurt to disable. However, I'm not sure Intel would dare do that - unlike now where they can just about squirm and say "only intel processors have the performance", it's impossible to claim not running on something if a specific feature is present is anything other than foul play.
Only if you see the "platform" as being KDE - and in that case, you could equally well say OOo's toolkit and the java stuff it uses constitutes a platform. I think the main reason KOffice performs so nicely is that Qt, and to a lesser extent kdelibs, are bloody well coded. Which is as you would expect - they're used for loads of applications and, in the case of Qt, is trolltech's primary product and they optimise the hell out of it. Wheras the OOo toolkit stuff is by all accounts pretty grungy and, at least as far as I know, not used for anything else, so there's less motivation to improve it.
I've got all of those with KOffice, and it performs a lot better. There may well be stuff it doesn't do that OO does, but they're features that aren't very used, at least to me, in exactly the same way as the stuff MS Office does that OO doesn't.
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We don't. But you'd be surprised how many of the "good guys" do bother to go through looking for problems, in some quite thorough fashion. There will be times when the bad guys have the vulnerability first, but I really don't think it will be that often, maybe 20% of the time.
It saddens me that this gets modded up. Go look up reducto ad absurdium. You never know, you might actually be capable of learning something.
Yeah right. How many IT departments won't let MS Office anywhere near them?
Because people use them and end up in a worse situation. And yes, they know this, but they still do it, because it's easier to worry about owing $x next Saturday than $3x in a month.
Marketing is (supposed to be) about simply informing people about your products. I certainly don't like marketing that interrupts and intrudes ("I'll look for info when I want the product, dammit") or that is deceptive, but that is not a problem with marketing per se, just a problem with how most modern marketing happens to be implemented.
Marketing is about doing whatever is necessary to maximise the sales of your product. Informing is part of that, but so is persuading and even manipulating.
I appreciate having information available, and oftentimes that information comes from the company itself (e.g. if I buy a printer, I want to know how many pages per minute it can print and at what resolution, what the price is, and the only way to really find out such info is marketing (that's what the printer company's website is).
Point. Passive marketing which doesn't get in my way is useful as long as it isn't deceptive. But it's also less effective than trying to get people who don't want it to buy your printer as well. That's the problem with being in a situation where you're trying to sell a product - it's in your interests to get people to do things they don't want to and that won't benefit them.
How could we possibly ever make purchasing decisions if there was no marketing? We couldn't even buy a simple printer.
You would get the specs in the shop, by law if nothing else, like you have to be told the weight of the meat you're buying. I suspect there are laws about it anyway, given the lengths some companies go to to hide their specs (how many actual pixels does that digital camera have without interpolation? You'll need a magnifying glass to read it).
There were bugs which made it a lot trickier than it should have been to install new searches last time I used ff. And isn't there one search that you can't change, the default if a domain doesn't exist or something.
Opera installs Google as well, and gets paid for it just like Mozilla.
The minute I notice something where they seem to care more about Google than me I will object. FF feels like it's pushing google at me, so far Opera hasn't.
Mozilla actually tries to follow W3C standards, so other standards-compliant browsers should be pretty close to right, even without testing.
Not really, because Mozilla puts a lot of effort into rendering broken pages well. If the page was written with good html in mind then yes, if it works in Moz it will probably work in most things - but that was the case with IE as well. If it was written in IE html and then modified to persuade it to render properly in ff, not really.
If your goal is to maximize the number of Opera users, no doubt, Firefox is a hindrance. If your goal is to maximize browser choice, it's surely a massive victory.
My goal is to have people using as good browsers as possible, and though firefox is a clear short-term win in that regard, I think ultimately it's going to hurt that aim.
Nothing is going to protect people from the gross stupidity of the occasional web designer. But there are surely less "IE and Mozilla only" sites than there were IE only sites before, especially when some designers thought that building sites around Windows-only ActiveX controls were a good idea.
I had never come across an IE-only site in that sense - maybe designers didn't realise other browsers existed so didn't bother to block them or something. And although they may be crossplatform, mozilla's extra stuff is just as bad from the point of browser lock-in (and there are sites that will give you activex control for IE, some kind of extendy thing for ff, and nothing for anyone else)
Yes, and other people have decided that since you can choose your browser now, it's okay to shop around and sample everything that's out there.
Not really. If it was possible to persuade them to switch to ff, it would have been possible to persuade them to switch to something else if they hadn't switched to ff.
If it was just spinoff it wouldn't matter. But it's not just the user's choice - they make money by making Google excessively integrated as shipped, and hard to change. I would prefer they charged directly for the browser than to have other interests more important than those of the user (and demonstrated this by buying opera, before you make a snide comment on how easy it is to take that attitude in theory). It's a very short step from what they're doing now to bundling Gator.
And if you say it's because they've been too aggressive at promoting their product, remember that before Firefox's popularity got off the ground, IE's market share was so towering that most commercial websites were developed and tested with only IE in mind. If Firefox were just another obscure browser with no market share, this would likely still be the case.
Wheras now they are developed and tested with only IE and FF in mind, and anyone else is no better off. In fact worse off, since there are now even less users for Opera, and I've had at least one site that will block browsers other than IE and firefox. Furthermore, I've known users who are now turned off switching - "I tried firefox and didn't like it, I'm sticking with IE from now on".
The native gecko-based browsers (k-melon/camino/galeon etc.) are generally superior (as is unsurprising really, a non-crossplatform version can be better integrated and so do a lot more cool things), and konqueror utterly blows it away IMO.
But there are GPL browsers that are 10x as good that don't get anywhere near as much attention. I don't know any serious hackers who use firefox - some are on mozilla suite, but most have (from what I've seen) moved on to better things.
I wouldn't say expect. But I would certainly think more of them were such the case.
Get over yourself, there just aren't enough programmers willing to live like paupers giving up their lives in some mother theresa style gesture doing volunteer development work while starving and living in the gutter ... you can't *make* software for free, programmers not only need money, they tend to demand a lot of it ...
There is a balance to be struck. You can do the pauper thing. Or you can be a completely unethical scumbag and make lots and lots of money. Neither of these is the best path.
further it's a free market, the Mozilla Foundation have found a business model that allows them to make money off a free browser and there is nothing wrong with that.
So there's nothing wrong with, say, loan sharks then?
you speak as though marketing itself is some form of evil.
Because it is. It's fundamentally antisocial. You waste the time of others in order to gain something for yourself.
Funny how it's always "other people" we expect to live to insanely idealised standards of devotion to ideologies of untainted technical purity, while for ourselves it's always OK to maximise the income we can earn from our own endeavours.
You don't know shit about how much I earn, how much I work on free software, and what standards I have for what I'll do for money. Don't assume that everyone is like yourself.
It implies they have more motivation to market, to exaggerate their features, to astroturf even. And I wonder if they are - they appear to have an unreasonable amount of support on sites like this for how good their browser actually is.
Didn't with CDs though. And that was pretty much the only time they tried as part of a consortium (joint thing with Phillips) rather than on their own - and that's what's happening this time.
Sure, just like lame ain't an mp3 encoder.
.Net is at least capable of doing this, and it does give a decent performance improvement. Personally I think it should overtake the JVM - more emphasis on choice of languages (of which java is one), and it seems to be generally improved.
You can get a reasonably decent CPU with the source available, though at the rate everyone's moving to x86 that may well soon cease to be the case. If you do go for FPGAs then yes, the performance hit will be huge - the processor I mentioned is nearly 15 years old, but the last discussion here still concluded it would be pretty impossible to implement it in an FPGA. But I'd hope there would be enough a market to make it worth doing some "proper" manufacturing of "clean" CPUs.
I've done it before to prove a point. Nothing happened. (And it's not my address anymore, so no point going through the archives to prove me wrong).
Why not hardware? I have the source code to the processor in the machine my webserver's running on. It's entirely useless to me since I don't have a chip fab, but I'm sure someone's done something cool with it.
As if you can't do that on the normal internet. How about: 1. Use SSL when sending sensitive information 2. Profit.
I can see an easy way Intel could make it hurt - rather than going by the CPUID, make things run slow on any processor which supports 3dnow. That's something which would very much hurt to disable. However, I'm not sure Intel would dare do that - unlike now where they can just about squirm and say "only intel processors have the performance", it's impossible to claim not running on something if a specific feature is present is anything other than foul play.
Only if you see the "platform" as being KDE - and in that case, you could equally well say OOo's toolkit and the java stuff it uses constitutes a platform. I think the main reason KOffice performs so nicely is that Qt, and to a lesser extent kdelibs, are bloody well coded. Which is as you would expect - they're used for loads of applications and, in the case of Qt, is trolltech's primary product and they optimise the hell out of it. Wheras the OOo toolkit stuff is by all accounts pretty grungy and, at least as far as I know, not used for anything else, so there's less motivation to improve it.
All that would mean is your proc appeared to be an intel one when it wasn't. I don't see this as being a big problem.
I've got all of those with KOffice, and it performs a lot better. There may well be stuff it doesn't do that OO does, but they're features that aren't very used, at least to me, in exactly the same way as the stuff MS Office does that OO doesn't.
That's a very bright, greyey yellow :)
The mozilla one is not peach. It is pale yellow. Anything with red = green is yellow, the blue is just a question of how light/dark a yellow.
Lol, yeah, that's why he's charging $.20 more than anyone else and putting it straight into Apple's coffers.
Given how much java makes me want to kill people, I don't think that's fair.