I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic or not. I've seen people actually flame someone else for errors in spelling, and totally blow it on thier own 'correction' post. In either case, this is why I try to use smileys or tags like Text does a shit job of conveying speech. ^_^
Yes, I accidentally said PIN number once, and used PIN in the correct syntax twice afterwards in the same post. The reason that it was put in 'YRO online' (Your Rights Online online? sounds kind of hypocritical.) is because that has become (whether rightfully or not) the defacto category for all news about not only your rights, but your information and who may be getting to it. It has (evolved|twisted) into a category to cover personal security alerts and things of that nature.
Actually, all the mail was slightly torn on that edge for our house as well as several of our neighbors and we all called the PO with a nicer version of the typical WTF complaint. But thanks for the mention, it was over 6 years ago and that account has been closed for 3 anyways.
Thanks though ^_^
PS, yes the PO actually fired the problematic delivery person who had placed the last straw on the camel's back that day.
The key point of this article (before the industry response) is not about some great new way to use photo editing software to steal someone's PIN number. The majority of it discusses the dangers of using new methods of mailing PIN and passwords that can be read by the HUMAN EYE, sometimes with no more technology than the ability to tilt the paper and shine a bright light.
The problem is not with the gimp or photoshop, but poor printing techniques that could put your 'secure' password information at risk with the simplest of methods. It still deserves a mention in YRO because I've even had a few letters mailed to me with PIN information like this. The letter had already been partially broken on one side due to handling, and I could see the PIN in the sunlight through the thin sheet even though that thin sheet is meant to let you know if someone has tampered with your information.
I think there's two parts to a large majority of the bad press that Google has been getting. Keep in mind, I'm not going to defend them blindly, but I just can't bring myself to buy into most of the garbage that's being run, so here goes:
1. Like you said ciro, people are just suing Google because they know that Google has money. It's like all the Michael Jackson pedophile cases (please don't go further into those). As long as people can suspect that something is going on even without proving it, they're going to go for the gold. Google tries to keep their secrets about the business and so people think that the mystery behind their search engine gives companies the right to sue over the stupidest things.
2. As childish and stupid as it may sound, I think there are a small number of cases of bad press about Google going around whose flames were fanned by getting lowered on the grand ladder of Page Rank. With how much money people are pouring into SEO and SEM 'experts' however knowledgable they really are, I can easily conceive that someone will cough up that same amount to shit on Google's front lawn when that SEO project resulted in a lower rank in the only engine they think matters.
Bottom line: The internet is a big and scary place, and when you can't find that mean man that stole your purse, you can blame it on that really big guy standing next to you because he's probably that big for a bad reason. Or at least you can make a few judges believe you.
I want to see Septera Core 2. I doubt too many people here have even played it, much less beat the game, but the ending leaves the entire thing wide open for a sequel and the story was extremely intesting.
I loved the fact that it had a semi-fantasy element, but a slight future punk side to it as well. It's almost like Gotham City in Batman, where you can never really tell (unless you're watching the later series') whether the whole timeline is supposed to be in the past or the future. Sure, some of the voice acting could use some work, but what game couldn't? And as far as that's concerned, the voices in SC were better than those in most of the games I played at that time.
Perhaps the two things that intrigued me the most about the technical aspects went like this:
At a time when everyone was getting on the 3D bandwaggon, trying to make polygons look less like polygons, SC instead went for detailed 2D simulated in a 3D sort of plane (kind of like Fallout). Instead of working on getting more polygons, they improved the look of their 2D graphics and worked around that.
And the sound, while the overworld music was great, and the battle music (as with almost any game still) could get annoying, many of the normal 'stages' didn't have music at all. But they did have the appropriate sound effects. When your entire house is dark and nobody else is home, those sounds can begin to creep you out after a few hours of play. I loved the ambience in the game.
As great as this device may or may not be, all the details I've seen surounding it still leave out on crucial piece of infomation:
Point: It will be available next month.
Counter-point: How soon will it be replacing normal DVD recorders at Walmart?
In other words, until it becomes widely marketed and distributed, it could (keyword: could) become just another niche device to die out in another year or so due to overwhelming cost of media.
That's what I explain elsewhere in my post, that they can't just attribute the track record of Microsoft to Google simply because both companies started with big dreams and Google is huge.
Besides, acquisition is part and parcel of the internet industry anymore. Look at Yahoo! and Konfabulator, for example (and thank god, I was waiting for a looooooong time for that program to be free) The big difference again, is that Google is actually giving us some serious innovation without charging the end user.
I think people are actually scared of Google because they don't know what to think of it. At first, everyone wanted to know how to achieve the golden orgasmic PageRank 10 from that little upstart search engine with such a simple friendly page. Now you have companies paying large sums of money to have 'experts' optimize their site for a seemingly great and monolithic Google, sometimes at the cost of ignoring all other search engines. So with this gigantic company, they have a Think Big kind of attitude, as the article points out. Where have we heard that before?...
Here's where everyone gets confused, though. Google isn't forcing its software onto nearly every computer manufactured. They aren't trying to force any sort of vendor lock-in or commit evil business practices so they can continue to give you "good enough" software either.
Forgive me for quoting people's gripes with Microsoft, but that's the difference between the services provided. To the end user, Google isn't costing us much of anything. People wanted a company to kill Microsoft, and now they might get it...and it scares them because the company they're tired of wanted to 'Think Big' and have big ambitions a long time ago too. People are trying to attribute the track history of MS to Google simply because of how quickly Google has taken off, and the fact that both companies were open about having great ambitions early-on.
Who hasn't? Can a company honestly succede without big goals to reach for? No.
On the other side of things, I was waiting for the day that Google would start getting bad press for anything and nothing. So far, every search engine that soared after it's IPO sunk not too long after and was quickly tossed to the wayside. Yahoo! actually survived surprisingly enough, but Google seems to be going another route: They're still worth money (and lots of it) but now some are turning from curious to suspicious about their former favorite. The little child with lots secrets can be seen as cute, the rich and powerful social elite with lots secrets must be hiding something malignant.
The only part about the negative press that annoys me is that nobody is giving Google the flexability to be a new company. They have to know how to behave like a giant from the start, and giants obviously must behave like monsters as far as the press is concerned.
Honestly, if movie studios are making paltry sums compared to video games, one would think that producers would learn something. If they want to capitalize on the overwhelming success of a game that has brought countless numbers of otherwise gameless keg monkeys to their local EB, they need to learn to play by a new set of rules.
I don't claim to be making accurate news statements, my last line even states that "it's just an idea."
I'm just trying to say that it's not that far fetched when the some of the newer Google goodies like the sidebar and Picasa/Blogger/Hello! are already working towards making their elements work together. Added the fact that Hello! is already a chat program with pictures, it's not entirely ill-conceived that Google could be working on a more mainstream chat client. Jabber would work extremely well considering that Google is all about openning their API's to the public. The only part of the original story that I find a little out there (but still not impossible) is setting a release date on it with a company as enigmatic as Google likes to makes themselves to be.
Also a point worth mentioning, but like I said, it's just my idea (ie. I'm not claiming my word as gospel truth). It is quite possible that both of these reasons are why nearly all things Google are BETA: security from accountability and the extended field testing sort of R&D for thier applications.
Personally, I couldn't care less if it's only BETA. I've been using quite a large amount of beta probrams from Google and I've yet to be disappointed. As far as tie ins, here's my idea:
The reason everything is still in beta is because Google wants to find out what their 'core' set of applications are going to be. Once they find the real crowd pleaser beta applications, they can work on a final release of each with features that integrate all of them.
It may never happen, but I think an instant messenger service could be an interesting way to unite the applications, like drawing a map in a google earth and using it's GoogleChat plug-in to send the.gmp(some made-up google map file extension) file to your friend which is imported into a pullout window in their GoogleDeskbar that they've been using for chat.
While this isn't always the case, the nice thing about paying for something is the paper trail it leaves behind. When you pay for the license to use the Linux trademark, there is a financial transaction that leaves a veritable homing beacon on your product for the purposes of 'policing' the trademark. Most/. readers have probably already seen, by now, a large number of creative and technology content given the OS wrong license with the appropriate legal battles as a result. This is just a man protecting the name he made.
As it has already been pointed out, trademarks aren't cheap and the name is the only thing that Linux himself actually "owns" in the truest sense of the word. As such, he has a right to charge for the right for people for using his trademark. There are plenty of companies that use the linux technology without the Linux name, afterall. It's not as if he's charging to use the kernel, just the word Linux in your product title.
My mistake, I was thinking half in PHP and half in Ruby at the time. Thanks for the correction. Now I know what's wrong with my latest project! (Just kidding)
As a side note, I find it helpful to others to negate my karma bonus when making these corrections;)
Like finding l337 phucking ways around $h|77y chat filters? I'm sure these kids will be giving presentations at Black Hat in no time;) </drippingwithsarcasm>
When it comes to underground wires, I can say this much from experience:
1. If they didn't install it underground to start, it's not going to get there any time soon (at least not in the US). I know there are probably exceptions to this rule, but there aren't that many in the vast majority of the country. If lines were put above your head, they're going to stay there.
2. When you have lines that are underground, they get damaged less often, which is a good thing. When they do, though, you can be without Utility['$foo'] for quite some time. I have a friend who lived in a brand new neighborhood with underground cable lines for TV and internet surrounded by people still working with the same old structures. And when something went wrong, it could take up to a month until they could watch TV or check their email in their own home.
So without a fast enough maitenence crew to service them, underground lines can be quite a hazard.
I remember a reading a lot of/.ers talking about how BPL is infinately more feeble in comparison to things like fiber lines and other forms of broadband connections in the works. Now, though, news of BPL comes at a relatively opportune time:
DSL carriers no longer have to share thier lines with everyone else, so all the little guys may whither and die. Here comes a new technology to rescue! And it comes through your powerlines! However...
This idea still rubs me the wrong way when I think that a blackout will leave me without my desktop AND internet access through what's left of my laptop battery...
You bring up an interesting point about suscepitbility. If I remember correctly, the same way that way Americans get horribly sick from Mexican water is the same way they sick on purified water because their systems aren't used to it. This brings up an issue that if we further sterilize everything to the point that we eliminate all 'bad' bacteria, then the smallest cold could be more powerful than West Nile or SARS.
For now, that's the case. It's quite possible that if the.xxx domain is kept without restriction, that the (I'll use this term in comparison, not as a general rule) 'respectable' sites like Playboy would hopefully migrate there. Or at least it's possible that they could get the business of the companies that don't need to rely on ad banners to make money.
With any luck, domian registrars could actually implement policies that could require porn sites with deception tactics like whitehouse.com to move to the new domain. Hell, I wouldn't mind if registrars provided the domain for free as an incentive for people to move. I've seen too many porn pages as the result of a typo when trying to get to a.com site. Besides, with the.com TLD as congested as it is, it couldn't hurt to get rid of some of the rubbish and help provide security at the same time. I know there would always be some sort of smut.com, but if the majority is on $foo.xxx, then parental controls become a little more effective by restricting an entire TLD.
(Before you flame or troll me, I'll have you know that I don't mind good porn sometimes, but the majority of what you find on the net isn't good... In fact, it makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Besides, too much of anything gets unhealthy.)
WIth the previous dominance of movies in the entertainment industry, one has to think about the possibilities. Movies still have quite a bit of pressence when marketed properly, and I've been seeing more and more movies coming out that would have never been made in such large numbers in the past because nobody thought so many 'geeks' would watch movies based on games/comics/sci-fi. What makes me curious is the possibility of seeing a game that is one day brought to you by $foo Studios and MGM. I know it may be far fetched, but rather than die out or just become media conglomerates, I think the movie studios would rather try to form some sort of symbiosis.
Look at the fact that IBM is one of the biggest vendors of Linux computers/servers in the world, if not the largest outright. If Linux runs on OSS primarily, then IBM has everything to gain by freely giving code to a project that can help improve the quality of the OS they ship their next systems with.
Even if it's only one program out of a hundred, IBM has nothing to lose by helping the projects that help their systems.
Chronology could make the link you provide somewhat invalid. That story mentions that market share slipped last month, yet I don't recall it saying where the figures are right now. But that's probably going to become irrelevant.
Even if the user-base hit a plateau already and everyone that wants Firefox, has it, this is article talks about providing accesability to a whole new audience. Being the first in the field does give one an advantage when the two biggest competitors are commercial (Opera) and slower than waiting for a new IE (uh...IE).
I know there are others, but when these are the three biggest players, Firefox stands to gain a good deal of respect in the accesability crowd if they pull this off with IBM.
By all means, it won't topple IE, but providing a good set of features to those with disabilities could actually see Firefox instituted in more public terminal situations like schools, libraries and such.
Besides, OSS tends to be pretty stubborn in the fact that the developers usually stop for nothing short of complete bankruptcy;) I don't think Firefox developers are going to let a one month slip get to them.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic or not. I've seen people actually flame someone else for errors in spelling, and totally blow it on thier own 'correction' post. In either case, this is why I try to use smileys or tags like Text does a shit job of conveying speech. ^_^
Yes, I accidentally said PIN number once, and used PIN in the correct syntax twice afterwards in the same post. The reason that it was put in 'YRO online' (Your Rights Online online? sounds kind of hypocritical.) is because that has become (whether rightfully or not) the defacto category for all news about not only your rights, but your information and who may be getting to it. It has (evolved|twisted) into a category to cover personal security alerts and things of that nature.
Actually, all the mail was slightly torn on that edge for our house as well as several of our neighbors and we all called the PO with a nicer version of the typical WTF complaint. But thanks for the mention, it was over 6 years ago and that account has been closed for 3 anyways.
Thanks though ^_^
PS, yes the PO actually fired the problematic delivery person who had placed the last straw on the camel's back that day.
The key point of this article (before the industry response) is not about some great new way to use photo editing software to steal someone's PIN number. The majority of it discusses the dangers of using new methods of mailing PIN and passwords that can be read by the HUMAN EYE, sometimes with no more technology than the ability to tilt the paper and shine a bright light.
The problem is not with the gimp or photoshop, but poor printing techniques that could put your 'secure' password information at risk with the simplest of methods. It still deserves a mention in YRO because I've even had a few letters mailed to me with PIN information like this. The letter had already been partially broken on one side due to handling, and I could see the PIN in the sunlight through the thin sheet even though that thin sheet is meant to let you know if someone has tampered with your information.
I think there's two parts to a large majority of the bad press that Google has been getting. Keep in mind, I'm not going to defend them blindly, but I just can't bring myself to buy into most of the garbage that's being run, so here goes:
1. Like you said ciro, people are just suing Google because they know that Google has money. It's like all the Michael Jackson pedophile cases (please don't go further into those). As long as people can suspect that something is going on even without proving it, they're going to go for the gold. Google tries to keep their secrets about the business and so people think that the mystery behind their search engine gives companies the right to sue over the stupidest things.
2. As childish and stupid as it may sound, I think there are a small number of cases of bad press about Google going around whose flames were fanned by getting lowered on the grand ladder of Page Rank. With how much money people are pouring into SEO and SEM 'experts' however knowledgable they really are, I can easily conceive that someone will cough up that same amount to shit on Google's front lawn when that SEO project resulted in a lower rank in the only engine they think matters.
Bottom line: The internet is a big and scary place, and when you can't find that mean man that stole your purse, you can blame it on that really big guy standing next to you because he's probably that big for a bad reason. Or at least you can make a few judges believe you.
I want to see Septera Core 2. I doubt too many people here have even played it, much less beat the game, but the ending leaves the entire thing wide open for a sequel and the story was extremely intesting.
I loved the fact that it had a semi-fantasy element, but a slight future punk side to it as well. It's almost like Gotham City in Batman, where you can never really tell (unless you're watching the later series') whether the whole timeline is supposed to be in the past or the future. Sure, some of the voice acting could use some work, but what game couldn't? And as far as that's concerned, the voices in SC were better than those in most of the games I played at that time.
Perhaps the two things that intrigued me the most about the technical aspects went like this:
At a time when everyone was getting on the 3D bandwaggon, trying to make polygons look less like polygons, SC instead went for detailed 2D simulated in a 3D sort of plane (kind of like Fallout). Instead of working on getting more polygons, they improved the look of their 2D graphics and worked around that.
And the sound, while the overworld music was great, and the battle music (as with almost any game still) could get annoying, many of the normal 'stages' didn't have music at all. But they did have the appropriate sound effects. When your entire house is dark and nobody else is home, those sounds can begin to creep you out after a few hours of play. I loved the ambience in the game.
Overall, we need Septera Core 2
As great as this device may or may not be, all the details I've seen surounding it still leave out on crucial piece of infomation:
Point: It will be available next month.
Counter-point: How soon will it be replacing normal DVD recorders at Walmart?
In other words, until it becomes widely marketed and distributed, it could (keyword: could) become just another niche device to die out in another year or so due to overwhelming cost of media.
That's what I explain elsewhere in my post, that they can't just attribute the track record of Microsoft to Google simply because both companies started with big dreams and Google is huge.
Besides, acquisition is part and parcel of the internet industry anymore. Look at Yahoo! and Konfabulator, for example (and thank god, I was waiting for a looooooong time for that program to be free) The big difference again, is that Google is actually giving us some serious innovation without charging the end user.
I think people are actually scared of Google because they don't know what to think of it. At first, everyone wanted to know how to achieve the golden orgasmic PageRank 10 from that little upstart search engine with such a simple friendly page. Now you have companies paying large sums of money to have 'experts' optimize their site for a seemingly great and monolithic Google, sometimes at the cost of ignoring all other search engines. So with this gigantic company, they have a Think Big kind of attitude, as the article points out. Where have we heard that before?...
Here's where everyone gets confused, though. Google isn't forcing its software onto nearly every computer manufactured. They aren't trying to force any sort of vendor lock-in or commit evil business practices so they can continue to give you "good enough" software either.
Forgive me for quoting people's gripes with Microsoft, but that's the difference between the services provided. To the end user, Google isn't costing us much of anything. People wanted a company to kill Microsoft, and now they might get it...and it scares them because the company they're tired of wanted to 'Think Big' and have big ambitions a long time ago too. People are trying to attribute the track history of MS to Google simply because of how quickly Google has taken off, and the fact that both companies were open about having great ambitions early-on.
Who hasn't? Can a company honestly succede without big goals to reach for? No.
On the other side of things, I was waiting for the day that Google would start getting bad press for anything and nothing. So far, every search engine that soared after it's IPO sunk not too long after and was quickly tossed to the wayside. Yahoo! actually survived surprisingly enough, but Google seems to be going another route: They're still worth money (and lots of it) but now some are turning from curious to suspicious about their former favorite. The little child with lots secrets can be seen as cute, the rich and powerful social elite with lots secrets must be hiding something malignant.
The only part about the negative press that annoys me is that nobody is giving Google the flexability to be a new company. They have to know how to behave like a giant from the start, and giants obviously must behave like monsters as far as the press is concerned.
They got sued for the name being too similar. Instead, we'll get Linszpier ^_^
Honestly, if movie studios are making paltry sums compared to video games, one would think that producers would learn something. If they want to capitalize on the overwhelming success of a game that has brought countless numbers of otherwise gameless keg monkeys to their local EB, they need to learn to play by a new set of rules.
I don't claim to be making accurate news statements, my last line even states that "it's just an idea."
I'm just trying to say that it's not that far fetched when the some of the newer Google goodies like the sidebar and Picasa/Blogger/Hello! are already working towards making their elements work together. Added the fact that Hello! is already a chat program with pictures, it's not entirely ill-conceived that Google could be working on a more mainstream chat client. Jabber would work extremely well considering that Google is all about openning their API's to the public. The only part of the original story that I find a little out there (but still not impossible) is setting a release date on it with a company as enigmatic as Google likes to makes themselves to be.
Also a point worth mentioning, but like I said, it's just my idea (ie. I'm not claiming my word as gospel truth). It is quite possible that both of these reasons are why nearly all things Google are BETA: security from accountability and the extended field testing sort of R&D for thier applications.
Personally, I couldn't care less if it's only BETA. I've been using quite a large amount of beta probrams from Google and I've yet to be disappointed. As far as tie ins, here's my idea:
.gmp(some made-up google map file extension) file to your friend which is imported into a pullout window in their GoogleDeskbar that they've been using for chat.
The reason everything is still in beta is because Google wants to find out what their 'core' set of applications are going to be. Once they find the real crowd pleaser beta applications, they can work on a final release of each with features that integrate all of them.
It may never happen, but I think an instant messenger service could be an interesting way to unite the applications, like drawing a map in a google earth and using it's GoogleChat plug-in to send the
It's just an idea.
While this isn't always the case, the nice thing about paying for something is the paper trail it leaves behind. When you pay for the license to use the Linux trademark, there is a financial transaction that leaves a veritable homing beacon on your product for the purposes of 'policing' the trademark. Most /. readers have probably already seen, by now, a large number of creative and technology content given the OS wrong license with the appropriate legal battles as a result. This is just a man protecting the name he made.
As it has already been pointed out, trademarks aren't cheap and the name is the only thing that Linux himself actually "owns" in the truest sense of the word. As such, he has a right to charge for the right for people for using his trademark. There are plenty of companies that use the linux technology without the Linux name, afterall. It's not as if he's charging to use the kernel, just the word Linux in your product title.
My mistake, I was thinking half in PHP and half in Ruby at the time. Thanks for the correction. Now I know what's wrong with my latest project! (Just kidding)
;)
As a side note, I find it helpful to others to negate my karma bonus when making these corrections
Like finding l337 phucking ways around $h|77y chat filters? I'm sure these kids will be giving presentations at Black Hat in no time ;) </drippingwithsarcasm>
When it comes to underground wires, I can say this much from experience:
1. If they didn't install it underground to start, it's not going to get there any time soon (at least not in the US). I know there are probably exceptions to this rule, but there aren't that many in the vast majority of the country. If lines were put above your head, they're going to stay there.
2. When you have lines that are underground, they get damaged less often, which is a good thing. When they do, though, you can be without Utility['$foo'] for quite some time. I have a friend who lived in a brand new neighborhood with underground cable lines for TV and internet surrounded by people still working with the same old structures. And when something went wrong, it could take up to a month until they could watch TV or check their email in their own home.
So without a fast enough maitenence crew to service them, underground lines can be quite a hazard.
I remember a reading a lot of /.ers talking about how BPL is infinately more feeble in comparison to things like fiber lines and other forms of broadband connections in the works. Now, though, news of BPL comes at a relatively opportune time:
DSL carriers no longer have to share thier lines with everyone else, so all the little guys may whither and die. Here comes a new technology to rescue! And it comes through your powerlines! However...
This idea still rubs me the wrong way when I think that a blackout will leave me without my desktop AND internet access through what's left of my laptop battery...
You bring up an interesting point about suscepitbility. If I remember correctly, the same way that way Americans get horribly sick from Mexican water is the same way they sick on purified water because their systems aren't used to it. This brings up an issue that if we further sterilize everything to the point that we eliminate all 'bad' bacteria, then the smallest cold could be more powerful than West Nile or SARS.
For now, that's the case. It's quite possible that if the .xxx domain is kept without restriction, that the (I'll use this term in comparison, not as a general rule) 'respectable' sites like Playboy would hopefully migrate there. Or at least it's possible that they could get the business of the companies that don't need to rely on ad banners to make money.
.com site. Besides, with the .com TLD as congested as it is, it couldn't hurt to get rid of some of the rubbish and help provide security at the same time. I know there would always be some sort of smut.com, but if the majority is on $foo.xxx, then parental controls become a little more effective by restricting an entire TLD.
With any luck, domian registrars could actually implement policies that could require porn sites with deception tactics like whitehouse.com to move to the new domain. Hell, I wouldn't mind if registrars provided the domain for free as an incentive for people to move. I've seen too many porn pages as the result of a typo when trying to get to a
(Before you flame or troll me, I'll have you know that I don't mind good porn sometimes, but the majority of what you find on the net isn't good... In fact, it makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Besides, too much of anything gets unhealthy.)
So how many years do you think it will be until Microsoft cares about it? ;) </toungeincheek)
WIth the previous dominance of movies in the entertainment industry, one has to think about the possibilities. Movies still have quite a bit of pressence when marketed properly, and I've been seeing more and more movies coming out that would have never been made in such large numbers in the past because nobody thought so many 'geeks' would watch movies based on games/comics/sci-fi. What makes me curious is the possibility of seeing a game that is one day brought to you by $foo Studios and MGM. I know it may be far fetched, but rather than die out or just become media conglomerates, I think the movie studios would rather try to form some sort of symbiosis.
Look at the fact that IBM is one of the biggest vendors of Linux computers/servers in the world, if not the largest outright. If Linux runs on OSS primarily, then IBM has everything to gain by freely giving code to a project that can help improve the quality of the OS they ship their next systems with.
Even if it's only one program out of a hundred, IBM has nothing to lose by helping the projects that help their systems.
Chronology could make the link you provide somewhat invalid. That story mentions that market share slipped last month, yet I don't recall it saying where the figures are right now. But that's probably going to become irrelevant.
;) I don't think Firefox developers are going to let a one month slip get to them.
Even if the user-base hit a plateau already and everyone that wants Firefox, has it, this is article talks about providing accesability to a whole new audience. Being the first in the field does give one an advantage when the two biggest competitors are commercial (Opera) and slower than waiting for a new IE (uh...IE).
I know there are others, but when these are the three biggest players, Firefox stands to gain a good deal of respect in the accesability crowd if they pull this off with IBM.
By all means, it won't topple IE, but providing a good set of features to those with disabilities could actually see Firefox instituted in more public terminal situations like schools, libraries and such.
Besides, OSS tends to be pretty stubborn in the fact that the developers usually stop for nothing short of complete bankruptcy