In other words, you tried installing an experts-only distro (Slackware) on hardware with no good linux drivers. Then, having apparently not learned the lesson, you bought more hardware without checking if it has good linux drivers.
Perhaps your next project should be getting GNU HURD/L4 on a Mac Mini working with a firewire video capture device...
P.S. : as for the SATA issue, if you've done some XP installs recently, you are probably aware that XP installation requires a driver floppy inserted during a certain 20-second window for untraditional hard drive configs (RAID, SCSI, and I think SATA also). By analogy if nothing else, you should have had in the back of your mind that there might be difficulties with installing Linux on a SATA drive.
I have to say my interest in the article plunged through the floor when I saw the example using Bush/WMDs as the subject. I immediately realized I'm either reading something written by a college student or someone who has not matured much beyond that. How gauche.
Why is using Bush/WMD's as an example any worse than, say, mentioning the Gallipoli operation, Kennedy's attempts to unseat Castro, Japan's 1592 invasion of Korea, the design of the RBMK nuclear reactor (Chernobyl), the US war on drugs, or any other case of a major world power majorly fucking up? Bush's search-for-WMD debacle is a fact, regardless of your political leanings, and it will stay in the history books for at least a century.
Saying that G.W.Bush is an imperialist monkeyboy = gauche. Saying that there are no WMD's in Iraq = fact. See the difference?
Gentoo with a friendly UI? That is... wrong, obscene somehow. Like LFS with an XFCE-4.2 style graphical installer. A major selling point of Gentoo is that it breaks you, kicks you, and forces you to understand how a Linux distro is built - like a marine bootcamp for the OS-impaired.
I suppose that without the install process to filter out the weak, we will soon be having even more ricers filling the Gentoo forums...
a signal spread out so broadly that it just looks like background noise if you aren't the one it's aimed at.
Would pose a problem for SETI if this is what all the other intelligent civilizations are doing.
If SETI can detect any sign of an alien DVD player communicating with an alien TV set on Tau Ceti, I would guess that SETI is using a time machine to import radio telescopes from AD 2500 (in which case, they might as well be importing hyperspace drives).
Seriosly though, high-power, unfocused, inefficient and uncompressed radio signals - the sort of thing SETI might be able to detect - are on the way out. Nowadays, signals travel over cables, or bounce from sattelites, and in any case use compression techniques that make the signal totally useless unless you know the protocol spec.
Perhaps the best sign of a high-technology civilization that we can detect is a planet that suddenly emits a burst of gamma rays and then stops emitting any signals forever...
There ARE computers that store their BIOS settings in NVRAM or EEPROM instead of CMOS.
Yes, there are: my Sun 4c, 4m, and 4u machines are good examples of this. However, the original discussion seemed to be focused on PC/X86, so my comments were made with that in mind.
Many (most?) Dell laptops store their BIOS in NVRAM. If you forget the BIOS password, you need to send the doorstop back to Dell...
1) That password you give your administrator account on your system can be hacked off in under 5 minutes with the Emergency Boot CD EBCD . So much for encryption.
That doesn't have anything to do with encryption. Anytime you have physical access to a computer all bets are off as far as security.
The grandparent was saying that in Windows, it is easy to recover the Administrator's password. This is bad because you can log in without a recovery CD, and the Administrator won't notice (his password will still be the same). In Linux, obtaining the root password is not so easy by default (because shadow uses a DES+salt hash by default) and nearly impossible if you set it up properly (if you use MD5 hash, which is the default for SuSE - don't know about other distros).
Linux encrypted filesystems I know almost nothing about, but I've also never seen a distribution that supports it out of the box.
As far as I am aware, every modern Linux distro supports encrypted filesystems out of the box (filesystems, not files - so the enemy can't even see your directory structure). Google for cryptoloop, and try it on your box... I personally use it for encrypting my swap partition.
The real protection against nature is the wealth that arises from free societies. The third world would not only pollute less if they entered the first world, but they would also be much better prepared to handle any possible problems.
I must disagree with pretty much all your points. First, the more wealth you have, the more wealth you have to lose. Consider the tsunamis (not caused by global warming, but a useful example nonetheless). In the Indian Ocean, they killed 150 000 Indonesians. Effect on the rest of the world : zilch. Such a tsunami in the Atlantic would kill 150 000 Americans and/or Europeans. Effect on the world : planet-wide financial crisis, cost of credit rises dramatically, every country suffers because no-one is willing to buy their exports any more. A minor disaster in a rich nation integrated into the global economy could well have worse cumulative effects than a major disaster in a poor, isolated nation.
You also mention that poor countries pollute more. The problem with your argument is that poor countries pollute more per $ of GDP, but produce less total pollution than similar richer nations. The US is reasonably energy-efficient, but because of the total size of its economy, it still produces ~ half the worldwide emissions. If you really want to cut down on emissions, you have two choices: stone age, or lots and lots of directed research. Natural economic growth is not a viable option.
Kyoto would cost America $200-300B/yr for decades, and save little compared with money spent on research into alternative fuels or space energy mining.
The whole point of Kyoto is to create incentives for better energy efficient tech - except instead of tax-funded grants for researching new technology, it provides penalties for using old technology. Sure, we would eventually develop better technology. Sure, we would do it more efficiently if the UN did not interfere with its regulations. The problem is, without the extra incentives, by the time we develop the technology much of the Earth's surface could be a desert...
I mean, if I fly to the US intending to wander round and find a hotel that looks nice to stay in, but don't know ahead of time where i will, in fact be staying, will I get detained at the airport?
Yes. You will be detained, questioned, and sent back on the next available flight (probably at your expense). Furthermore, the fact that you were denied entry to the US will be recorded in the Big INS Computer of Doom. You might not be aware of this (unless you are a non-US citizen, in that case you probably have friends/relatives with US Immigration horror stories), but if you are denied entry to the US once, that is reason enough for US embassies to never issue you a visa again. So chances are, that will be your last trip to the hospitable American shores - and you won't see much besides the airport...
By the way, EU countries do the same thing, especially to third world visitors. Some of my Russian friends had to provide letters from the hotels they would be staying at verifying that they had reservations just to get a one-week Italian visa.
I'll just spring for the extra 500 bucks and have apple do it for me.....or just buy two whole stinkin' computers for the same price. Hmm....
You can build two stinking x86 computers - or one very decent x86 computer, which would be my choice - for $500. If you know how to put parts together, you can easily make something that outperforms the mini. The problem is that 95% of the people out there don't build, but buy their machines from Dell, HP, etc. and $500 Dells suck badly. They come with Celerons and Intel Integrated graphics, they don't have Firewire or CD burners, and so the Mac mini looks reasonably competitive - especially if you value the aesthetics.
Have you used any _recent_ Linux thread? LinuxThreads is an implementation of the Posix 1003.1c thread package.
Dude, get with the times, LinuxThreads are obsolete. Kernel 2.6 / glibc 2.3 use NPTL, which launches new threads four times faster than LinuxThreads, allows you to have more than 8192 threads per process, doesn't require you to have lots of manager threads that don't do anything useful, delivers signals to threads as opposed to processes, and is actually more-or-less POSIX compliant.
I've been using NPTL on my workstation for 12 months, and I haven't looked back (except when early versions of Mono were incompatible with NPTL). You talk about "any _recent_ Linux thread" - but it looks like you are using a Debian Woody...
If it can scale to 16 procs well, it will scale to 64 procs well.
Until you start talking about double that amount of procs, which is what Windows Server does these days
Wrong. Windows Server 2003 supports a maximum of only 64 processors, and I believe it was significantly tested only on 32-way and smaller machines.
Languages need to evolve out of the pure text medium. [...] High-level development tools like Delphi were early adopters of the philosophy that code doesn't need to be visualized as text when it's better to visualize it graphically.
I believe the term you are looking for is "code generators", not languages. Inkscape and Sodipodi generate XML code, but they aren't languages - they are just tools for drawing pictures. Similarly with Delphi, except in that case the pictures are ugly pieces of Win32 API.
And why are formulas like that represented with such a poor syntax? Why can't I easily use proper Greek letters and standard math notations such as dots for multiplication, a horizontal line for divisions/fractions, etc.? Why can't I insert images into the source file which illustrate the concept it implements?
Many modern languages support unicode - so you can use all the greek variablenames that you want. For "proper mathematical notation", you might want to look at Mathematica (which pretty-prints math) or at Perl6 (which allows you to define new operators with unicode names). For general-purpose languages, it's usually inconvenient, because e.g. there is no "dot" key on standard keyboards.
As for inserting images and other documentation into your code - just use doxygen or any other documentation-generation system that compiles your commented source code and external resources into a pretty html / pdf / dvi / whatever document.
Unix geeks typically balk at non-textual files, but I blame it on a fundamental lack of imagination.
I blame it on the fact that I can't edit your damn png-infested source code with vim over a choppy laggy text-only ssh connection. You don't always have access to X or some other windowing system.
load in less than 5 seconds on 1+G CPUs, all O/S Definitely. use less memory when a large number of pages are loaded (I can easily use most of my 256M on my laptop), maybe provide a max memory limit option Better yet, provide a button (in preferences->advanced) to clear the in-memory cache, or at least to dump it to the hard drive.
include mozilla.org packages for Linux O/S (rpms, debs, etc.) Why? That would only cause distro maintainers' unemployment...
support Active X controls under Windows NO - security.
option to shrink the text (reduce font size, ec.) when I shrink a window And images too, like in Opera.
include integration with desktop search and include a free search add-on for non-Windows O/Ss Impossible. A desktop search engine needs to be closely integrated into the desktop environment to be useful, and mozilla's philosophy is platform independence. However, don't despair - both KDE and Gnome are working on desktop search for their next versions.
include an easier ability to get updates, plugins, etc. and load them in via current native format without a cycle of "download, save, rpm -Uvh, etc." That can be solved with a plugin. Actually, for gnome, there is a mozilla-bonobo plugin, but it's very buggy.
updates, packages, etc. for Linux should be in the native package formats (rpm, deb, etc.) Why? That's the distro maintainers' job. If your feel that your distro's maintainers don't update their packages fast enough, you should switch to Gentoo.
include an RSS reader Yes
provide some form of diagnostics to the user when mozilla fails to properly start launch/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin from the command line and look at the messages?
provide some form of reset settings/options when you can't get mozilla to properly load Won't help if your mozilla crashes early enough in its load process...
include a mode where mozilla can run under a chroot jail and possibly under a secure account under Linux/UNIX Chroot would be hard, because mozilla uses many external libraries - X, Gtk, ft, etc.
include option for pdf printing Acrobat plugin - works on all popular OS's.
include 3d rendering and VRML as plugins I don't know anyone who uses them. But it won't hurt I suppose...
provide some xquery support (plugin?) Sure
include a wget type mirror tools (plugin?) Plugin. Actually, I would be surprised if someone hasn't already made such a plugin.
No. I believe they were damaged by a Soviet anti-aircraft vehicle (I am guessing a ZSU) that was escorting the Iraqi National Guard tank column on its ill-fated thrust to the south in the early days of the invasion. There isn't much you can do to protect a helicopter from high-speed 57mm AP cannons...
The 90 year old Iraqi farmer posing with his ancient rifle in front of the downed Apache was just for propaganda.
This has to be one of the stupidest, most nonsensical analogies I've ever seen on slashdot.
Why? The gmail bug allows you to read random snippets of mail that's located near yours on a gmail server hard drive (at least that's the way I understood it) - same as if the post office was making photocopies of your mail, and sending them to a guy five streets over.
Yeah, like you've got to be a highly-trained spy to open your neighbor's mailbox and read the contents.
No, but you do have to have some skill to read your neighbors email box under ordinary circumstances. Unless you operate an ISP, or are on the same network segment as your victim, you will have some difficulty in reading his packets. It's not enough to just run ethereal. There are ways to do it, but Joe Sixpack doesn't know about them. The gmail bug significantly lowers the barrier to entry to reading other people's email, just like a post office that provides other with photocopies of your stuff dramatically lowers the barrier to entry to strangers reading your postcards. The whole point of my analogy was to show that "plaintext email is already insecure so gmail bug doesn't matter" argument is bollocks.
Plaintext should be treated as though you were sending a postcard in the mail.
Most people have the reasonable expectation that their postcards are at least being delivered to the right recipients. The gmail bug is equivalent to the post office making photocopies of a postcard and stuffing them in all your neighbors' postboxes. It allows lots of technically illiterate people with no hacker/secret-agent/NSA training to read your mail.
what would you do if you had a GREAT idea for a REVOLUTIONARY gaadget, but didn't have the resources to create a prototype?
I would take a bank loan, ask my family and friends, max out my credit cards, talk to a VC if worst comes to worst... A capitalist economy has many people willing to give money to a GREAT REVOLUTIONARY startup. You just have to find them, and give a convincing presentation.
My first thought was: the directive was stalled. The parliament got what it wanted: no legalization of software patents. Why reinitiate the debate, when you've already won?
We (freedom-loving people) didn't win, we merely took the item off the immediate agenda, which will hopefully delay them for a few months. The only way to permanently stop software patents is to rewrite the directive, make it totally toothless, make it go through a thousand committees, and hopefully make sure it gets lost in some eurocrat's desk drawer.
Now we are just waiting for a platform-dependent implementation in C++ and MFC that is supposed to be faster because it's "native code", which all the clueless kids with 8mbit internet connections are going to download...
Even network-limited programs like a bt client still need to worry about GUI responsiveness and memory usage. It would be insane to write the first implementation of such a program in C/C++ -- Perl and Python were given to us by gods to prototype these sorts of projects -- but once the basic protocol and UI behavior has been figured out, I would try to rewrite the client in a statically compiled (or at least a JIT-capable) language.
because downloaders still need a way to find the content. So you switched from a central tracker to a distributed RPC system - but you still need someone to give you an IP address and a port to connect to the swarm. As long as Joe Sixpack can find the swarm and connect to it, so can RIAA/MPAA attack-bots, and then the fun begins...
* MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk, a CD-ROM drive,... * DVDs, VCDs, and Audio CDs * from satellite card (DVB-S), * Several types of network stream : UDP Unicast, UDP Multicast (MPEG-TS), HTTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS, etc. * From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)
Notice that Windows Media is not listed. So if you want to play a Windows Media file (which is the only sort of format that allows the phishing attack described in TFA), you still have to use the unsecure bloated Windows Media Player, or some equivalent gui front-end to DirectShow.
The problem is that Winamp (IIRC) uses DirectShow and standard Windows codecs for playing movies; WMP is also essentially a gui front-end for DirectShow. (It's just like Linux where you have xine-lib with its plugins, and all sorts of guis for it - xine-ui, kaffeine, totem etc). My guess is that the Windows Media DRM is implemented at the codec level or in the DirectShow pipeline, and not in the media player - otherwise, the DRM would be trivial to circumvent. The only real solution is a usable windows port of xine-lib or mplayer (even helixplayer would work, as long as it implements its own video pipeline).
Are you implying that we shouldn't care about the freedom of software researchers in other countries?
Violating the DMCA gets you jailed in the US, disassembling a binary gets you jail time in France, posting the results on a blog gets you in trouble in Iran... Is there a single country in the world where one can do security research without being accosted by the Man?
How much have you paid Linus, Alan Cox, Andrew Morton, et. al., directly?
And how much money have you paid to Microsoft Slave Contractor #7836 directly? You haven't. You paid $1000 to www.dell.com, some of which (a percentage that undoubtedly depended on the day's financial conditions) was earmarked for paying for debts incurred by that quarter's Windows OEM licenses; and through the magic of capitalism, somehow Microsoft Slave Contractor #7836 ended up with a paycheck to cover his rent. Similarly, I don't pay Linus or am or any other kernel devs. Instead, I convince my friends and family to use open-source software; which makes open-source a larger, and therefore more valuable market; which, through the magic of capitalism ensures that corporations (Transmeta, OSDL, etc.) keep Linus fed and housed.
Seriously, have you ever paid a programmer directly for the code he wrote?
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, you tried installing an experts-only distro (Slackware) on hardware with no good linux drivers. Then, having apparently not learned the lesson, you bought more hardware without checking if it has good linux drivers.
Perhaps your next project should be getting GNU HURD/L4 on a Mac Mini working with a firewire video capture device...
P.S. : as for the SATA issue, if you've done some XP installs recently, you are probably aware that XP installation requires a driver floppy inserted during a certain 20-second window for untraditional hard drive configs (RAID, SCSI, and I think SATA also). By analogy if nothing else, you should have had in the back of your mind that there might be difficulties with installing Linux on a SATA drive.
I have to say my interest in the article plunged through the floor when I saw the example using Bush/WMDs as the subject. I immediately realized I'm either reading something written by a college student or someone who has not matured much beyond that. How gauche.
Why is using Bush/WMD's as an example any worse than, say, mentioning the Gallipoli operation, Kennedy's attempts to unseat Castro, Japan's 1592 invasion of Korea, the design of the RBMK nuclear reactor (Chernobyl), the US war on drugs, or any other case of a major world power majorly fucking up? Bush's search-for-WMD debacle is a fact, regardless of your political leanings, and it will stay in the history books for at least a century.
Saying that G.W.Bush is an imperialist monkeyboy = gauche. Saying that there are no WMD's in Iraq = fact. See the difference?
Gentoo with a friendly UI? That is ... wrong, obscene somehow. Like LFS with an XFCE-4.2 style graphical installer. A major selling point of Gentoo is that it breaks you, kicks you, and forces you to understand how a Linux distro is built - like a marine bootcamp for the OS-impaired.
I suppose that without the install process to filter out the weak, we will soon be having even more ricers filling the Gentoo forums...
This suggests that AMD uses Emacs.
Good thing those new Opterons are almost fast enough to run it...
a signal spread out so broadly that it just looks like background noise if you aren't the one it's aimed at.
Would pose a problem for SETI if this is what all the other intelligent civilizations are doing.
If SETI can detect any sign of an alien DVD player communicating with an alien TV set on Tau Ceti, I would guess that SETI is using a time machine to import radio telescopes from AD 2500 (in which case, they might as well be importing hyperspace drives).
Seriosly though, high-power, unfocused, inefficient and uncompressed radio signals - the sort of thing SETI might be able to detect - are on the way out. Nowadays, signals travel over cables, or bounce from sattelites, and in any case use compression techniques that make the signal totally useless unless you know the protocol spec.
Perhaps the best sign of a high-technology civilization that we can detect is a planet that suddenly emits a burst of gamma rays and then stops emitting any signals forever...
There ARE computers that store their BIOS settings in NVRAM or EEPROM instead of CMOS.
Yes, there are: my Sun 4c, 4m, and 4u machines are good examples of this. However, the original discussion seemed to be focused on PC/X86, so my comments were made with that in mind.
Many (most?) Dell laptops store their BIOS in NVRAM. If you forget the BIOS password, you need to send the doorstop back to Dell...
1) That password you give your administrator account on your system can be hacked off in under 5 minutes with the Emergency Boot CD EBCD . So much for encryption.
That doesn't have anything to do with encryption. Anytime you have physical access to a computer all bets are off as far as security.
The grandparent was saying that in Windows, it is easy to recover the Administrator's password. This is bad because you can log in without a recovery CD, and the Administrator won't notice (his password will still be the same). In Linux, obtaining the root password is not so easy by default (because shadow uses a DES+salt hash by default) and nearly impossible if you set it up properly (if you use MD5 hash, which is the default for SuSE - don't know about other distros).
Linux encrypted filesystems I know almost nothing about, but I've also never seen a distribution that supports it out of the box.
As far as I am aware, every modern Linux distro supports encrypted filesystems out of the box (filesystems, not files - so the enemy can't even see your directory structure). Google for cryptoloop, and try it on your box... I personally use it for encrypting my swap partition.
The real protection against nature is the wealth that arises from free societies. The third world would not only pollute less if they entered the first world, but they would also be much better prepared to handle any possible problems.
I must disagree with pretty much all your points. First, the more wealth you have, the more wealth you have to lose. Consider the tsunamis (not caused by global warming, but a useful example nonetheless). In the Indian Ocean, they killed 150 000 Indonesians. Effect on the rest of the world : zilch. Such a tsunami in the Atlantic would kill 150 000 Americans and/or Europeans. Effect on the world : planet-wide financial crisis, cost of credit rises dramatically, every country suffers because no-one is willing to buy their exports any more. A minor disaster in a rich nation integrated into the global economy could well have worse cumulative effects than a major disaster in a poor, isolated nation.
You also mention that poor countries pollute more. The problem with your argument is that poor countries pollute more per $ of GDP, but produce less total pollution than similar richer nations. The US is reasonably energy-efficient, but because of the total size of its economy, it still produces ~ half the worldwide emissions. If you really want to cut down on emissions, you have two choices: stone age, or lots and lots of directed research. Natural economic growth is not a viable option.
Kyoto would cost America $200-300B/yr for decades, and save little compared with money spent on research into alternative fuels or space energy mining.
The whole point of Kyoto is to create incentives for better energy efficient tech - except instead of tax-funded grants for researching new technology, it provides penalties for using old technology. Sure, we would eventually develop better technology. Sure, we would do it more efficiently if the UN did not interfere with its regulations. The problem is, without the extra incentives, by the time we develop the technology much of the Earth's surface could be a desert...
I mean, if I fly to the US intending to wander round and find a hotel that looks nice to stay in, but don't know ahead of time where i will, in fact be staying, will I get detained at the airport?
Yes. You will be detained, questioned, and sent back on the next available flight (probably at your expense). Furthermore, the fact that you were denied entry to the US will be recorded in the Big INS Computer of Doom. You might not be aware of this (unless you are a non-US citizen, in that case you probably have friends/relatives with US Immigration horror stories), but if you are denied entry to the US once, that is reason enough for US embassies to never issue you a visa again. So chances are, that will be your last trip to the hospitable American shores - and you won't see much besides the airport...
By the way, EU countries do the same thing, especially to third world visitors. Some of my Russian friends had to provide letters from the hotels they would be staying at verifying that they had reservations just to get a one-week Italian visa.
I'll just spring for the extra 500 bucks and have apple do it for me.....or just buy two whole stinkin' computers for the same price. Hmm....
You can build two stinking x86 computers - or one very decent x86 computer, which would be my choice - for $500. If you know how to put parts together, you can easily make something that outperforms the mini. The problem is that 95% of the people out there don't build, but buy their machines from Dell, HP, etc. and $500 Dells suck badly. They come with Celerons and Intel Integrated graphics, they don't have Firewire or CD burners, and so the Mac mini looks reasonably competitive - especially if you value the aesthetics.
Have you used any _recent_ Linux thread? LinuxThreads is an implementation of the Posix 1003.1c thread package.
Dude, get with the times, LinuxThreads are obsolete. Kernel 2.6 / glibc 2.3 use NPTL, which launches new threads four times faster than LinuxThreads, allows you to have more than 8192 threads per process, doesn't require you to have lots of manager threads that don't do anything useful, delivers signals to threads as opposed to processes, and is actually more-or-less POSIX compliant.
I've been using NPTL on my workstation for 12 months, and I haven't looked back (except when early versions of Mono were incompatible with NPTL). You talk about "any _recent_ Linux thread" - but it looks like you are using a Debian Woody...
If it can scale to 16 procs well, it will scale to 64 procs well.
Until you start talking about double that amount of procs, which is what Windows Server does these days
Wrong. Windows Server 2003 supports a maximum of only 64 processors, and I believe it was significantly tested only on 32-way and smaller machines.
Languages need to evolve out of the pure text medium. [...] High-level development tools like Delphi were early adopters of the philosophy that code doesn't need to be visualized as text when it's better to visualize it graphically.
I believe the term you are looking for is "code generators", not languages. Inkscape and Sodipodi generate XML code, but they aren't languages - they are just tools for drawing pictures. Similarly with Delphi, except in that case the pictures are ugly pieces of Win32 API.
And why are formulas like that represented with such a poor syntax? Why can't I easily use proper Greek letters and standard math notations such as dots for multiplication, a horizontal line for divisions/fractions, etc.? Why can't I insert images into the source file which illustrate the concept it implements?
Many modern languages support unicode - so you can use all the greek variablenames that you want. For "proper mathematical notation", you might want to look at Mathematica (which pretty-prints math) or at Perl6 (which allows you to define new operators with unicode names). For general-purpose languages, it's usually inconvenient, because e.g. there is no "dot" key on standard keyboards.
As for inserting images and other documentation into your code - just use doxygen or any other documentation-generation system that compiles your commented source code and external resources into a pretty html / pdf / dvi / whatever document.
Unix geeks typically balk at non-textual files, but I blame it on a fundamental lack of imagination.
I blame it on the fact that I can't edit your damn png-infested source code with vim over a choppy laggy text-only ssh connection. You don't always have access to X or some other windowing system.
load in less than 5 seconds on 1+G CPUs, all O/S /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin from the command line and look at the messages?
Definitely.
use less memory when a large number of pages are loaded (I can easily use most of my 256M on my laptop), maybe provide a max memory limit option
Better yet, provide a button (in preferences->advanced) to clear the in-memory cache, or at least to dump it to the hard drive.
include mozilla.org packages for Linux O/S (rpms, debs, etc.)
Why? That would only cause distro maintainers' unemployment...
support Active X controls under Windows
NO - security.
option to shrink the text (reduce font size, ec.) when I shrink a window
And images too, like in Opera.
include integration with desktop search and include a free search add-on for non-Windows O/Ss
Impossible. A desktop search engine needs to be closely integrated into the desktop environment to be useful, and mozilla's philosophy is platform independence. However, don't despair - both KDE and Gnome are working on desktop search for their next versions.
include an easier ability to get updates, plugins, etc. and load them in via current native format without a cycle of "download, save, rpm -Uvh, etc."
That can be solved with a plugin. Actually, for gnome, there is a mozilla-bonobo plugin, but it's very buggy.
updates, packages, etc. for Linux should be in the native package formats (rpm, deb, etc.)
Why? That's the distro maintainers' job. If your feel that your distro's maintainers don't update their packages fast enough, you should switch to Gentoo.
include an RSS reader
Yes
provide some form of diagnostics to the user when mozilla fails to properly start
launch
provide some form of reset settings/options when you can't get mozilla to properly load
Won't help if your mozilla crashes early enough in its load process...
include a mode where mozilla can run under a chroot jail and possibly under a secure account under Linux/UNIX
Chroot would be hard, because mozilla uses many external libraries - X, Gtk, ft, etc.
include option for pdf printing
Acrobat plugin - works on all popular OS's.
include 3d rendering and VRML as plugins
I don't know anyone who uses them. But it won't hurt I suppose...
provide some xquery support (plugin?)
Sure
include a wget type mirror tools (plugin?)
Plugin. Actually, I would be surprised if someone hasn't already made such a plugin.
No. I believe they were damaged by a Soviet anti-aircraft vehicle (I am guessing a ZSU) that was escorting the Iraqi National Guard tank column on its ill-fated thrust to the south in the early days of the invasion. There isn't much you can do to protect a helicopter from high-speed 57mm AP cannons...
The 90 year old Iraqi farmer posing with his ancient rifle in front of the downed Apache was just for propaganda.
This has to be one of the stupidest, most nonsensical analogies I've ever seen on slashdot.
Why? The gmail bug allows you to read random snippets of mail that's located near yours on a gmail server hard drive (at least that's the way I understood it) - same as if the post office was making photocopies of your mail, and sending them to a guy five streets over.
Yeah, like you've got to be a highly-trained spy to open your neighbor's mailbox and read the contents.
No, but you do have to have some skill to read your neighbors email box under ordinary circumstances. Unless you operate an ISP, or are on the same network segment as your victim, you will have some difficulty in reading his packets. It's not enough to just run ethereal. There are ways to do it, but Joe Sixpack doesn't know about them. The gmail bug significantly lowers the barrier to entry to reading other people's email, just like a post office that provides other with photocopies of your stuff dramatically lowers the barrier to entry to strangers reading your postcards. The whole point of my analogy was to show that "plaintext email is already insecure so gmail bug doesn't matter" argument is bollocks.
Sheesh, some people just don't get analogies...
Plaintext should be treated as though you were sending a postcard in the mail.
Most people have the reasonable expectation that their postcards are at least being delivered to the right recipients. The gmail bug is equivalent to the post office making photocopies of a postcard and stuffing them in all your neighbors' postboxes. It allows lots of technically illiterate people with no hacker/secret-agent/NSA training to read your mail.
what would you do if you had a GREAT idea for a REVOLUTIONARY gaadget, but didn't have the resources to create a prototype?
I would take a bank loan, ask my family and friends, max out my credit cards, talk to a VC if worst comes to worst... A capitalist economy has many people willing to give money to a GREAT REVOLUTIONARY startup. You just have to find them, and give a convincing presentation.
My first thought was: the directive was stalled. The parliament got what it wanted: no legalization of software patents. Why reinitiate the debate, when you've already won?
We (freedom-loving people) didn't win, we merely took the item off the immediate agenda, which will hopefully delay them for a few months. The only way to permanently stop software patents is to rewrite the directive, make it totally toothless, make it go through a thousand committees, and hopefully make sure it gets lost in some eurocrat's desk drawer.
Now we are just waiting for a platform-dependent implementation in C++ and MFC that is supposed to be faster because it's "native code", which all the clueless kids with 8mbit internet connections are going to download...
Even network-limited programs like a bt client still need to worry about GUI responsiveness and memory usage. It would be insane to write the first implementation of such a program in C/C++ -- Perl and Python were given to us by gods to prototype these sorts of projects -- but once the basic protocol and UI behavior has been figured out, I would try to rewrite the client in a statically compiled (or at least a JIT-capable) language.
because downloaders still need a way to find the content. So you switched from a central tracker to a distributed RPC system - but you still need someone to give you an IP address and a port to connect to the swarm. As long as Joe Sixpack can find the swarm and connect to it, so can RIAA/MPAA attack-bots, and then the fun begins...
Notice that Windows Media is not listed. So if you want to play a Windows Media file (which is the only sort of format that allows the phishing attack described in TFA), you still have to use the unsecure bloated Windows Media Player, or some equivalent gui front-end to DirectShow.
If AOL would open the WinAmp source
The problem is that Winamp (IIRC) uses DirectShow and standard Windows codecs for playing movies; WMP is also essentially a gui front-end for DirectShow. (It's just like Linux where you have xine-lib with its plugins, and all sorts of guis for it - xine-ui, kaffeine, totem etc). My guess is that the Windows Media DRM is implemented at the codec level or in the DirectShow pipeline, and not in the media player - otherwise, the DRM would be trivial to circumvent. The only real solution is a usable windows port of xine-lib or mplayer (even helixplayer would work, as long as it implements its own video pipeline).
Are you implying that we shouldn't care about the freedom of software researchers in other countries?
Violating the DMCA gets you jailed in the US, disassembling a binary gets you jail time in France, posting the results on a blog gets you in trouble in Iran... Is there a single country in the world where one can do security research without being accosted by the Man?
How much have you paid Linus, Alan Cox, Andrew Morton, et. al., directly?
And how much money have you paid to Microsoft Slave Contractor #7836 directly? You haven't. You paid $1000 to www.dell.com, some of which (a percentage that undoubtedly depended on the day's financial conditions) was earmarked for paying for debts incurred by that quarter's Windows OEM licenses; and through the magic of capitalism, somehow Microsoft Slave Contractor #7836 ended up with a paycheck to cover his rent. Similarly, I don't pay Linus or am or any other kernel devs. Instead, I convince my friends and family to use open-source software; which makes open-source a larger, and therefore more valuable market; which, through the magic of capitalism ensures that corporations (Transmeta, OSDL, etc.) keep Linus fed and housed.
Seriously, have you ever paid a programmer directly for the code he wrote?