It's funny, you know. When a mean, nasty, opressive country like Iraq, or Cuba, or China puts up firewalls, it's not a surprise. They're the enemy after all, the bad guys, they're supposed to do bad things.
But as soon as an American ally does something like that, it's a big shock, because the Americans only deal with free, open, happy countries that love each other and everyone else, right?
Come on, Kuwait is only an ally because they have oil. If the US didn't need Kuwait's oil, Iraq would have taken them over long ago and no one would've given a damn. They're still an Islamic state, and they still behave according to their beliefs. Just because the US is willing to look the other way to get cheap oil doesn't mean they're the nicest people on the planet. Conversely, just because the US doesn't like a country doesn't mean it's all that bad.
Kuwait isn't on the same side of the political fence, they're on the same side of the economic fence. Their behaviour (which is their choice, whether we agree with it or not) should come as no surprise. Let's stop listening to what CNN has to say and actually learn something, shall we?
Why is that Intel's GUID problems were such a big deal and this barely gets a shrug?
I'd wager because no one has, to my knowledge, used Intel's GUIDs to identify people. Most software that tracks users with specific UIDs makes the UIDs itself (i.e. specific to that install), and therefore you don't need a GUID in hardware to do the trick.
Not to say that people should have a right to anonymity, but companies are going to be tracking users as long as they can get away with it, and they don't need a hardware GUID to do it. Register your realplayer to nospam@real.com (pword is nospam), and who cares if they know that some person that watches Garbage music videos also spends Sunday afternoon at ifilm.com? It gets them nothing, it costs you nothing. Relax.
Summary: Evil companies are evil already. GUIDs are unnecessary. Being alarmist gets you nowhere.
at work im the first 6 chars of my last name 1st initial. it works, except for the boogerj@..
And I thought mine was bad. dudey@... (D. Udey) is either read as 'dude y' or 'doodey', neither of which is particularly fun. fortunately, 'danudey' is a short enough username for any system I've ever used.
You could always go for entirely nonsensical names. My UNB ID is 'd93w4'. the 'd' has nothing to do with my name (a friend of mine whose initials are ajb has 'o284e'), the 93 has nothing to do with the date I enrolled (2002), and I can't even think about what the w4 might mean but doesn't. As near as I can tell, it's pretty much either random or incremental somehow. Go figure.
It would also be nice to copy the way every app is self-contained within its own directory. Uninstall app? Simply delete directory - no dependency hell.
Yeah, it would sure be nice if someone had thought of that before - if they'd had that kind of ingenuity back in 1984, who knows what the world would be like now! We might even have a choice of operating systems with these features!
And I hate to disappoint you, but cooperative multitasking, while providing 'blazing speeds' when you're only doing one thing at once, it's right up there with unprotected memory as soon as you want to do more than one thing at once (like burn a CD and browse the web), and most people don't want to buy a separate computer just for CD burning.
Agreed. I was bopping around Superstore (grocery store) two days ago and picked up Alpha Centauri for $10 myself ($CDN too, no less).
Septerra Core though.... I need to find that puppy. Haven't been to the e-tron at Wal-Mart here yet, I don't think. I'll have to go back and look closer.
Fresh and tasty Debian packages of WineX 2.0 (which supports Max Payne FLAWLESSLY) are available for the price of a $5 (1 month subscription). If I were you, I'd sign up for the 6 month plan...If you do sign up, hook me up with the 'refer-a-friend' thing and reference 'ramses0' if you think about it.
As much as I'd love to help you, I find that installing Linux to play Windows games under Wine on a P120 with 80 megs of ram makes little to no sense.;) Another time perhaps.
While I realize that Americans are taught that nothing exists outside of the US's borders, I feel I should nitpick.
The US government may not be building or using nuclear power plants or technology or what-have-you, but other countries, such as Canada, are going full steam ahead, and have for a long time. Americans aren't the only ones who know how to make modern nuclear reactors. Just because your country is lagging behind doesn't mean everyone else is too.
I spent 10 minutes writing about this then Mozilla quit on me, so I'll keep it short out of frustration.
Teach them to use cross-platform toolkits (SDL, Crystalspace) and APIs (OpenGL, OpenAL) whenever possible. Companies don't put out Mac games because they're too lazy, or they don't want to spend money having someone else port it (and in-house developers are too busy fixing known release bugs). If you can tell your employer 'the game is ready to go gold, and we can ship Windows, Mac, and Linux versions immediately', they'll know that, even if they don't release right away, it's easy to do sooner rather than later, and if they DO release them at the same time, people will love you. I refuse to buy The Sims because they don't care about Mac users (we're two expansion packs behind so far, and I don't know if we'll ever get them), but if a company shows that they actually care about Mac users, rather than 'hey, these apple things, can they play games too?', I'll look more favourably upon them. Maybe I won't get this game, but I'll consider it, or the next one, more seriously.
Teach them to code well, not fast. Putting out a good game eventually is better than putting out a crappy game now. That being said, don't be Daikatana (putting out a crappy game eventually isn't the way to go). Teach them that bugs at release and patches a few months down the road are going to translate into people buying it from the bargain bin in six months, after fifteen patches, and that bad code, even if they're told 'write bad code, but make it fast', may be the boss' fault at release, but it's the programmers' fault when the company has to cut jobs. If you need another month to test, tell them that the game is unstable and corrupts important files (well, that's getting borderline). Besides, if nothing else, 'finishing' a game, having it lambasted with bad reviews, and then having to spend the next year patching bugs under pressure is not as fulfilling as being done when you're done.
Other points about games that are worth mentioning. If there's any way to make a game expandable and provide something different even over time (Half-Life mods, Escape Velocity plugins, Warcraft Maps, UT online play, Fallout open-ended play, Everquest expansions), it will improve your bottom line substantially. Half-Life and assorted add-ons are still selling for $30-$50 (depending on the store and the valuation of your country's particular dollar on the currency exchanges). This is a design decision, of course, but if they've got input, they should suggest it. Multiplayer is a quick-and-dirty solution, but look into other options. Even today, I'm scouring the city for Fallout 2, because it's such a fun game, and my friends still LAN party with UT. Not only will it increase sales at launch-time, money will keep trickling in long after the final patch goes live and the code is archived to a CVS server in the basement.
This is just the ideas I can think of right now. I'm sure other people can add more, but this is what I like.
I wouldn't expect a/.'er to know jack shit about the Buran.
You're a slashdotter, and you seem to know what's going on (to some extent). You're not the smartest person on slashdot just because you know some details, so you won't get anywhere acting like you are. Seriously, thanks for the clarification, but lose the attitude.
I never use IE. I never use Media Player. I would never use XP's CD burning features, or CD ripping features, or extra bullshit sidebar mouseover contextual hyperlink garbage. Why do I have to have it?
I like the approach of taking XP embedded and adding to that. Adding what you need results in less than taking away what you don't need, and I'd like to have an OS that doesn't actually take my entire HD to install (literally).
APIs are nice, but if I can't replace IE with mozilla, I want to get rid of it. I don't want the second-most insecure software package there is forced upon me on every windows PC I use. It's nothing but a liability. I don't mind if they default the OS installs to have everything, as long as I can uninstall (or at least disable and unload from memory) the bits I don't want.
File formats are nice too, don't get me wrong, but the only reason I really care about MS Office file formats is so that I can use a decent word processor (MS Word) and still have my files read on other systems (of mine and my friends).
For me personally, getting rid of garbage I don't want is the top priority. I can always install other office suites (why does no one bitch about non-open WP formats?), I can always install other browsers, but if I can't get rid of MS's built-in garbage, I'll have two of everything, and that makes no sense.
Some of these so-called 'anti-privacy measures' can actually help privacy in some cases. For example, face recognition technology. A terrorist's face can be put into the computer and the computer can scan faces. This removes the need for police and airport security, etc. to grill every arab or asian or about who they are, what they're doing, where they're going, and why. A computer doesn't discriminate against race, religion, or nationality.
ID cards are similar. The problem, however, is WHEN you let the ID card be used. You shouldn't have police be able to demand to see your ID, but it should be required for some things (government services, employment, or as an option to prove your identity to anyone (Blockbuster, etc).
It can be done, and will probably be done eventually. People point to South Africa and the Soviet Union for how national ID cards are bad, but Israel has them, most EU countries have them. The issue is not do we do it, but how do we do it well.
And remember people, if you can't wait for the latest issue of Time Magazine to hit the shelves, you can always check out Time Canada for the latest leaked articles.
I actually have my own test URL up (http://www.cdslash.net/temp/back.htm which makes a great companion to my XP logout exploit which works great in IE6 (that example logs out WinXP and Win2K with crappo security settings. If you don't have a logoff.exe, you're fine).
Results so far, it works for me, but it does NOT work for a friend who is running Win98, as I am, but IE 5.x instead of 6.0 (which I have).
Considering that Quark's put out two versions in something like 8 years, I wouldn't hold out hope for them to bother with an OS X port. Hell, their last release, almost a year after OS X was released, still isn't OSX native.
We're looking at Adobe InDesign right now. Seems like Adobe clued in that Pagemaker couldn't cut it, so they started over, and boy is InDesign nice. It can even import Quark documents perfectly (better than Quark can, IMO), exports as PDF (and does it well, unlike Canvas:/), and so on. It's really a nice package, and I would suggest downloading the demo and playing with it. The person who does all of our instruction manual design was sold in 2 minutes.
I had a big long rant which got wiped because stupid lynx thought I wanted to go 'back', so I'll summarize.
First, I specified that i meant 'cross-toolkit', not merely cross-app. Second, I listed a whack of toolkits, like gtk, qt, xaw, tk, the crap XFree apps come with, etc.
Then I listed a ton of apps that theme themselves, like XMMS, Mozilla, licq with the QT plugin (one app, several looks, great idea), freeamp, gqmpeg. Then I mentioned windowmanagers (WM dockapps are different from other apps, and behave entirely differently too), and pointed out how Enlightenment's interface TOTALLY changes - not just look, but basic functionality - when you so much as change themes.
Yeah, all GTK apps look the same, and all KDE apps look the same, but don't fool yourself into thinking that Linux has anything even remotely resembling a consistant interface. Windows isn't that much better, and MacOS, while significantly better, and while the usability guidelines are strictly adhered to, even in Quicktime/iTunes, has its share.
The latest Mozilla builds allow building binaries that use native GUI widgets on Aqua and XP. That being said, I'd rather use one of the Carbon- (hehehe) or Cocoa-based Gecko browsers out there.
That being said, Mozilla doesn't fit into Linux either, except insofar as nothing on Linux makes any attempt to fit with anything else (cross-toolkit-wise; Linux is a sorry, sad hodgepodge. I don't mind it, personally, but still, it's dumb).
The rest of your points are spot-on. Mac users want Mac software that works. It's ironic, really, that 5% of the market has such freedom of choice, while the other 95% are, by and large, locked into certain choices if they are to interoperate. Still, I'm not complaining.
(...types the Win98 user into mozilla... but we have a G4 in the living room, really!)
A national ID card and centralized database won't lose you any of your privacy. All it will do is take away the illusion of privacy. You think the government can't track you now? Show ID at the airport, use a bank card or CC when you land to get some cash, activate your cellphone while you're in the taxi, and they can track you if they want to. They can do all this stuff already.
All an ID card will do is make it slightly easier for them to do it, and much harder for terrorists to use forged documentation to travel, make it easier to prove you are who you say you are.
Many European countries have national ID cards, but The Man isn't keeping them down. UK has cameras all over the place, but they're still not being taught Newspeak. The problem is not in the cards, it's in how they're used. If you don't trust your government, elect a new one. If that's not feasible, move to another country. Yeah Ellison's a nutjob, but so what? Leave the country and don't go back.
Unless you're a large company, in which case nothing changes for 30 years (let's face it, COBOL is not exactly today's language of choice, but it is still widely used). Sure the little guys jitter around like a jumping bean on a hot plate, but the monoliths (by and large) build systems and stick with them. You can't afford to stay behind, but you can't afford to upgrade every 6 months either, and changing languages is just a pain.
Blame your own system. Everyone I know uses Mozilla (tarballs, source, or Win32/MacOS installers), and no one's ever had a problem. Try using the tarballs, or try actualy finding out what the problem is. Maybe you have some binary-incompatible libraries (*ahem*Helix*cough*) kicking around somewhere.
Then again, maybe it's just the way the world works, but it's not like they can test packages on EVERYONE'S computer. Fact is, it's not going to work for some people with weird/messed up systems. Maybe it's just not your day.
I would assume this is because most operating systems have one font rendering routine that works fine, and so Mozilla can just use the normal text rendering. KDE is written with QT, which handles all that stuff. Mozilla needs to specifically code in Freetype support, which may not even be present on the X server -or- the client end.
Yes, it'd be nice, but I don't blame them for not putting it on the priority list. X isn't on the same page as everyone else, and that's where the problem lies.
Which happens to be illegal under both US and WTO rules, if memory serves. The findings that other countries were "dumping" steel onto the US markets (selling it at below cost) were what enabled the President to impose steel tariffs.
Right, and according to the WTO, Canada is NOT dumping lumber, but the US imposed tarrifs anyways. Let's face it, the US is only concerned with globalism insofar as it allows American companies to make more money. They even ignored American consumers, such as the builders of low-cost housing, whose housing will be less low-cost as a result of having to buy more expensive US lumber.
That's the great thing about the US. American companies didn't even HAVE to 'come in', or even sell at reasonable, let alone below-cost, prices to crush competition. They just dumped money into pockets and it was done. Globalism will never succeed until the US is willing to play fair. Until then, people will oppose it, and rightly so.
Maybe, just maybe, it's because he starts serious, interesting discussion on interesting topics. If you don't like it, then use your preferences to stop reading it, but personally, I like the discussions and input provided by various slashdotters on the topic. Even if you only read Katz's article to gain some sense of context for the impending discussion, at least there are interesting points to be had from the discussion itself.
Sadly, it appears that increasing my comment threshold to 3 hasn't blocked all Katz-whiners out, and I'm all out of mod points, so if you don't mind, do those of us who enjoy discussion a favour, block the stories out, and don't post to them. You don't have to deal with Katz, we don't have to deal with you, everyone wins.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny, you know. When a mean, nasty, opressive country like Iraq, or Cuba, or China puts up firewalls, it's not a surprise. They're the enemy after all, the bad guys, they're supposed to do bad things.
But as soon as an American ally does something like that, it's a big shock, because the Americans only deal with free, open, happy countries that love each other and everyone else, right?
Come on, Kuwait is only an ally because they have oil. If the US didn't need Kuwait's oil, Iraq would have taken them over long ago and no one would've given a damn. They're still an Islamic state, and they still behave according to their beliefs. Just because the US is willing to look the other way to get cheap oil doesn't mean they're the nicest people on the planet. Conversely, just because the US doesn't like a country doesn't mean it's all that bad.
Kuwait isn't on the same side of the political fence, they're on the same side of the economic fence. Their behaviour (which is their choice, whether we agree with it or not) should come as no surprise. Let's stop listening to what CNN has to say and actually learn something, shall we?
--Dan
If you browse at 'Sort by highest scores first', the comment directly above yours (as I type this) is #3518782, which answers your question.
Normally I don't cross-link within stories, but this has got to be some kind of sign or something.
--Dan
Why is that Intel's GUID problems were such a big deal and this barely gets a shrug?
I'd wager because no one has, to my knowledge, used Intel's GUIDs to identify people. Most software that tracks users with specific UIDs makes the UIDs itself (i.e. specific to that install), and therefore you don't need a GUID in hardware to do the trick.
Not to say that people should have a right to anonymity, but companies are going to be tracking users as long as they can get away with it, and they don't need a hardware GUID to do it. Register your realplayer to nospam@real.com (pword is nospam), and who cares if they know that some person that watches Garbage music videos also spends Sunday afternoon at ifilm.com? It gets them nothing, it costs you nothing. Relax.
Summary: Evil companies are evil already. GUIDs are unnecessary. Being alarmist gets you nowhere.
--Dan
at work im the first 6 chars of my last name 1st initial. it works, except for the boogerj@..
And I thought mine was bad. dudey@... (D. Udey) is either read as 'dude y' or 'doodey', neither of which is particularly fun. fortunately, 'danudey' is a short enough username for any system I've ever used.
You could always go for entirely nonsensical names. My UNB ID is 'd93w4'. the 'd' has nothing to do with my name (a friend of mine whose initials are ajb has 'o284e'), the 93 has nothing to do with the date I enrolled (2002), and I can't even think about what the w4 might mean but doesn't. As near as I can tell, it's pretty much either random or incremental somehow. Go figure.
--Dan
It would also be nice to copy the way every app is self-contained within its own directory. Uninstall app? Simply delete directory - no dependency hell.
Yeah, it would sure be nice if someone had thought of that before - if they'd had that kind of ingenuity back in 1984, who knows what the world would be like now! We might even have a choice of operating systems with these features!
And I hate to disappoint you, but cooperative multitasking, while providing 'blazing speeds' when you're only doing one thing at once, it's right up there with unprotected memory as soon as you want to do more than one thing at once (like burn a CD and browse the web), and most people don't want to buy a separate computer just for CD burning.
--Dan
Agreed. I was bopping around Superstore (grocery store) two days ago and picked up Alpha Centauri for $10 myself ($CDN too, no less).
Septerra Core though.... I need to find that puppy. Haven't been to the e-tron at Wal-Mart here yet, I don't think. I'll have to go back and look closer.
--Dan
Fresh and tasty Debian packages of WineX 2.0 (which supports Max Payne FLAWLESSLY) are available for the price of a $5 (1 month subscription). If I were you, I'd sign up for the 6 month plan...If you do sign up, hook me up with the 'refer-a-friend' thing and reference 'ramses0' if you think about it.
;) Another time perhaps.
As much as I'd love to help you, I find that installing Linux to play Windows games under Wine on a P120 with 80 megs of ram makes little to no sense.
--Dan
While I realize that Americans are taught that nothing exists outside of the US's borders, I feel I should nitpick.
The US government may not be building or using nuclear power plants or technology or what-have-you, but other countries, such as Canada, are going full steam ahead, and have for a long time. Americans aren't the only ones who know how to make modern nuclear reactors. Just because your country is lagging behind doesn't mean everyone else is too.
--Dan
I spent 10 minutes writing about this then Mozilla quit on me, so I'll keep it short out of frustration.
Teach them to use cross-platform toolkits (SDL, Crystalspace) and APIs (OpenGL, OpenAL) whenever possible. Companies don't put out Mac games because they're too lazy, or they don't want to spend money having someone else port it (and in-house developers are too busy fixing known release bugs). If you can tell your employer 'the game is ready to go gold, and we can ship Windows, Mac, and Linux versions immediately', they'll know that, even if they don't release right away, it's easy to do sooner rather than later, and if they DO release them at the same time, people will love you. I refuse to buy The Sims because they don't care about Mac users (we're two expansion packs behind so far, and I don't know if we'll ever get them), but if a company shows that they actually care about Mac users, rather than 'hey, these apple things, can they play games too?', I'll look more favourably upon them. Maybe I won't get this game, but I'll consider it, or the next one, more seriously.
Teach them to code well, not fast. Putting out a good game eventually is better than putting out a crappy game now. That being said, don't be Daikatana (putting out a crappy game eventually isn't the way to go). Teach them that bugs at release and patches a few months down the road are going to translate into people buying it from the bargain bin in six months, after fifteen patches, and that bad code, even if they're told 'write bad code, but make it fast', may be the boss' fault at release, but it's the programmers' fault when the company has to cut jobs. If you need another month to test, tell them that the game is unstable and corrupts important files (well, that's getting borderline). Besides, if nothing else, 'finishing' a game, having it lambasted with bad reviews, and then having to spend the next year patching bugs under pressure is not as fulfilling as being done when you're done.
Other points about games that are worth mentioning. If there's any way to make a game expandable and provide something different even over time (Half-Life mods, Escape Velocity plugins, Warcraft Maps, UT online play, Fallout open-ended play, Everquest expansions), it will improve your bottom line substantially. Half-Life and assorted add-ons are still selling for $30-$50 (depending on the store and the valuation of your country's particular dollar on the currency exchanges). This is a design decision, of course, but if they've got input, they should suggest it. Multiplayer is a quick-and-dirty solution, but look into other options. Even today, I'm scouring the city for Fallout 2, because it's such a fun game, and my friends still LAN party with UT. Not only will it increase sales at launch-time, money will keep trickling in long after the final patch goes live and the code is archived to a CVS server in the basement.
This is just the ideas I can think of right now. I'm sure other people can add more, but this is what I like.
--Dan
I wouldn't expect a /.'er to know jack shit about the Buran.
You're a slashdotter, and you seem to know what's going on (to some extent). You're not the smartest person on slashdot just because you know some details, so you won't get anywhere acting like you are. Seriously, thanks for the clarification, but lose the attitude.
--Dan
I never use IE. I never use Media Player. I would never use XP's CD burning features, or CD ripping features, or extra bullshit sidebar mouseover contextual hyperlink garbage. Why do I have to have it?
I like the approach of taking XP embedded and adding to that. Adding what you need results in less than taking away what you don't need, and I'd like to have an OS that doesn't actually take my entire HD to install (literally).
APIs are nice, but if I can't replace IE with mozilla, I want to get rid of it. I don't want the second-most insecure software package there is forced upon me on every windows PC I use. It's nothing but a liability. I don't mind if they default the OS installs to have everything, as long as I can uninstall (or at least disable and unload from memory) the bits I don't want.
File formats are nice too, don't get me wrong, but the only reason I really care about MS Office file formats is so that I can use a decent word processor (MS Word) and still have my files read on other systems (of mine and my friends).
For me personally, getting rid of garbage I don't want is the top priority. I can always install other office suites (why does no one bitch about non-open WP formats?), I can always install other browsers, but if I can't get rid of MS's built-in garbage, I'll have two of everything, and that makes no sense.
--Dan
Some of these so-called 'anti-privacy measures' can actually help privacy in some cases. For example, face recognition technology. A terrorist's face can be put into the computer and the computer can scan faces. This removes the need for police and airport security, etc. to grill every arab or asian or about who they are, what they're doing, where they're going, and why. A computer doesn't discriminate against race, religion, or nationality.
ID cards are similar. The problem, however, is WHEN you let the ID card be used. You shouldn't have police be able to demand to see your ID, but it should be required for some things (government services, employment, or as an option to prove your identity to anyone (Blockbuster, etc).
It can be done, and will probably be done eventually. People point to South Africa and the Soviet Union for how national ID cards are bad, but Israel has them, most EU countries have them. The issue is not do we do it, but how do we do it well.
--Dan
And remember people, if you can't wait for the latest issue of Time Magazine to hit the shelves, you can always check out Time Canada for the latest leaked articles.
--Dan
Yes.
--Dan
I actually have my own test URL up (http://www.cdslash.net/temp/back.htm which makes a great companion to my XP logout exploit which works great in IE6 (that example logs out WinXP and Win2K with crappo security settings. If you don't have a logoff.exe, you're fine).
Results so far, it works for me, but it does NOT work for a friend who is running Win98, as I am, but IE 5.x instead of 6.0 (which I have).
--Dan
We don't have to pay for our e-mails. It's like health care, I guess our taxes pay for it or something.
--Dan
Considering that Quark's put out two versions in something like 8 years, I wouldn't hold out hope for them to bother with an OS X port. Hell, their last release, almost a year after OS X was released, still isn't OSX native.
:/), and so on. It's really a nice package, and I would suggest downloading the demo and playing with it. The person who does all of our instruction manual design was sold in 2 minutes.
We're looking at Adobe InDesign right now. Seems like Adobe clued in that Pagemaker couldn't cut it, so they started over, and boy is InDesign nice. It can even import Quark documents perfectly (better than Quark can, IMO), exports as PDF (and does it well, unlike Canvas
--Dan
I had a big long rant which got wiped because stupid lynx thought I wanted to go 'back', so I'll summarize.
First, I specified that i meant 'cross-toolkit', not merely cross-app. Second, I listed a whack of toolkits, like gtk, qt, xaw, tk, the crap XFree apps come with, etc.
Then I listed a ton of apps that theme themselves, like XMMS, Mozilla, licq with the QT plugin (one app, several looks, great idea), freeamp, gqmpeg. Then I mentioned windowmanagers (WM dockapps are different from other apps, and behave entirely differently too), and pointed out how Enlightenment's interface TOTALLY changes - not just look, but basic functionality - when you so much as change themes.
Yeah, all GTK apps look the same, and all KDE apps look the same, but don't fool yourself into thinking that Linux has anything even remotely resembling a consistant interface. Windows isn't that much better, and MacOS, while significantly better, and while the usability guidelines are strictly adhered to, even in Quicktime/iTunes, has its share.
Linux is just the worst of the lot, that's all.
--Dan
The latest Mozilla builds allow building binaries that use native GUI widgets on Aqua and XP. That being said, I'd rather use one of the Carbon- (hehehe) or Cocoa-based Gecko browsers out there.
That being said, Mozilla doesn't fit into Linux either, except insofar as nothing on Linux makes any attempt to fit with anything else (cross-toolkit-wise; Linux is a sorry, sad hodgepodge. I don't mind it, personally, but still, it's dumb).
The rest of your points are spot-on. Mac users want Mac software that works. It's ironic, really, that 5% of the market has such freedom of choice, while the other 95% are, by and large, locked into certain choices if they are to interoperate. Still, I'm not complaining.
(...types the Win98 user into mozilla... but we have a G4 in the living room, really!)
--Dan
A national ID card and centralized database won't lose you any of your privacy. All it will do is take away the illusion of privacy. You think the government can't track you now? Show ID at the airport, use a bank card or CC when you land to get some cash, activate your cellphone while you're in the taxi, and they can track you if they want to. They can do all this stuff already.
All an ID card will do is make it slightly easier for them to do it, and much harder for terrorists to use forged documentation to travel, make it easier to prove you are who you say you are.
Many European countries have national ID cards, but The Man isn't keeping them down. UK has cameras all over the place, but they're still not being taught Newspeak. The problem is not in the cards, it's in how they're used. If you don't trust your government, elect a new one. If that's not feasible, move to another country. Yeah Ellison's a nutjob, but so what? Leave the country and don't go back.
--Dan
Unless you're a large company, in which case nothing changes for 30 years (let's face it, COBOL is not exactly today's language of choice, but it is still widely used). Sure the little guys jitter around like a jumping bean on a hot plate, but the monoliths (by and large) build systems and stick with them. You can't afford to stay behind, but you can't afford to upgrade every 6 months either, and changing languages is just a pain.
--Dan
Blame your own system. Everyone I know uses Mozilla (tarballs, source, or Win32/MacOS installers), and no one's ever had a problem. Try using the tarballs, or try actualy finding out what the problem is. Maybe you have some binary-incompatible libraries (*ahem*Helix*cough*) kicking around somewhere.
Then again, maybe it's just the way the world works, but it's not like they can test packages on EVERYONE'S computer. Fact is, it's not going to work for some people with weird/messed up systems. Maybe it's just not your day.
--Dan
I would assume this is because most operating systems have one font rendering routine that works fine, and so Mozilla can just use the normal text rendering. KDE is written with QT, which handles all that stuff. Mozilla needs to specifically code in Freetype support, which may not even be present on the X server -or- the client end.
Yes, it'd be nice, but I don't blame them for not putting it on the priority list. X isn't on the same page as everyone else, and that's where the problem lies.
--Dan
Which happens to be illegal under both US and WTO rules, if memory serves. The findings that other countries were "dumping" steel onto the US markets (selling it at below cost) were what enabled the President to impose steel tariffs.
Right, and according to the WTO, Canada is NOT dumping lumber, but the US imposed tarrifs anyways. Let's face it, the US is only concerned with globalism insofar as it allows American companies to make more money. They even ignored American consumers, such as the builders of low-cost housing, whose housing will be less low-cost as a result of having to buy more expensive US lumber.
That's the great thing about the US. American companies didn't even HAVE to 'come in', or even sell at reasonable, let alone below-cost, prices to crush competition. They just dumped money into pockets and it was done. Globalism will never succeed until the US is willing to play fair. Until then, people will oppose it, and rightly so.
--Dan
Maybe, just maybe, it's because he starts serious, interesting discussion on interesting topics. If you don't like it, then use your preferences to stop reading it, but personally, I like the discussions and input provided by various slashdotters on the topic. Even if you only read Katz's article to gain some sense of context for the impending discussion, at least there are interesting points to be had from the discussion itself.
Sadly, it appears that increasing my comment threshold to 3 hasn't blocked all Katz-whiners out, and I'm all out of mod points, so if you don't mind, do those of us who enjoy discussion a favour, block the stories out, and don't post to them. You don't have to deal with Katz, we don't have to deal with you, everyone wins.
--Dan