Dude, get a grip. If you're talking about this airport (you didn't link directly to an airport so I had to scroll around for it), then it's an even better example of what I'm talking about. You can even see everything on this ramp because the white isn't as intense as Ramstein's obviously newer ramps.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that they've added some kind of infrared-reflecting coating to the ramps to make the planes on them harder to see on satellite photos (if so, it didn't help much) but these photos were definitely not digitally altered after the fact.
I probably should have clarified that yes, it's probably a good idea to get a police officer's attention in the event of a life-threatening emergency but that's pretty much where I myself would draw the line.
I think it's interesting that what is normally a dry subject is generating so much public interest.
I've been looking at it this way:
1. Banks screw over gullible subprime buyers with shit mortgages that they know can't be paid back.
2. Banks screw over other banks by selling those shit mortgages to them.
3. The top shareholders who know the true value of these shit mortgages get out while they're ahead and walk away billions of dollars richer because they know someone's going to notice this eventually.
4. The banks that stayed thought they could keep duping people indefinitely but were finally left with all these shit mortgages and their businesses begin to crumble.
5. The economy tanks as it notices that banks are failing because of the shit mortgages.
6. The banks tell the government, "Hey guys, we need round about $700 billion to stay alive or else your economy is going tank further. Nevermind that it was our fault, just fix it for us, mkay"
Now, here's what I take away from that:
If we do nothing, some more banks fail and the economy continues to dive and the average citizen takes a financial hit until the market bounces back, which it will eventually.
If we hand over a $700 billion check to the banks, they continue to operate and the economy *might* bounce back a little quicker. But--and here's the rub--that $700 billion comes from taxpayers like you and me. So we still take a hit. And who does this $700 billion go to? Rich Wall Street types so they can continue doing their business and keeping the profits in the end.
I don't know about you, but as an average citizen, I feel like I've gotten screwed either way. The latter way twice. Since I have a good mortgage and a good job at a privately-held company that's doing great, I would much rather see the country take a little bit more of an economic hit than reward a bunch of rich bastards for first screwing over poor would-be homeowners and then the world's economy.
Remember kids, talking to police is not usually in your best interest. Be polite and complicit within your rights, but don't volunteer information.
Change that "usually" to "never" and you're spot on. You should never ever talk to the police about anything, period, unless you have your lawyer literally sitting right there beside you.
You think that's an extreme paranoid mindset? You think I'm some loony hippy anarchist? Then maybe you'd like to hear it straight from a law school professor and an actual police detective. If they're going to stand up there and advise you not to talk to the police under any circumstances, then why on earth would you?
They give a lot of good examples where you can conceivably incriminate yourself (or at least end up looking suspicious to a jury) even if you're completely innocent of any wrong-doing, were nowhere near a crime in your whole life, and have a bulletproof alibi for every second you're awake.
It all boils down to this: If you're stopped on the street by a cop who asks you a question, you say you can't help them and move on. If they block your path, you ask them if you're under arrest. If you're not under arrest, you move on. If you are arrested, you give them whatever information they need to put you in their files, and nothing else until your lawyer arrives, no matter how friendly or intimidating they act.
Remember also that police cannot search your property unless they have a court warrant, you consent to a search, or if they have probable cause. Don't consent to a search and don't have probable cause.
Don't get me wrong here, I have nothing personally against police themselves. There are surely many great police officers who catch the bad guys and help old ladies across the street. It's the system I distrust because there's no effective oversight of police power anywhere in this country and we keep seeing individuals as well as entire police departments abusing their authority whilst looking for people to shoot, intimidate, and lock up whether or not they did anything wrong.
1. Leave the helpdesk job off your resume. If they ask why the gap, make something up.
2. So you've been working two years in helpdesk without being offered a promotion? Either the company's promotion process is broken or you are. Where I work, everybody starts out at helpdesk, no matter what position they are applying for. Even if it's just for a week or two, you start out answering phones and move up from there. Some people do, some don't, some actually like helpdesk.
Agreed. If you have an hour to waste by clicking on Next Page links to read a poorly-researched and graphics-heavy "article," then it's hard to go wrong here.
That said, it sounds like the author of TFA doesn't really know what he wants, and/or doesn't understand how computers are built. On the first page, he bemoans the cheap plastic toy-like look of the Eee PC and others while praising the solid professional construction of the MiniNote and then finally concludes that a professional business-class netbook should cost the same as your all-plastic Eee PC. Good luck with that particular wish.
There are tons of other inconsistencies as well, such as stating that he doesn't need video capability but then later saying that HDMI would be nice, so he could watch videos on a TV. Wot?
Finally, I have a huge time trusting a site called "Trusted Reviews" when every page of the review contains a prominent ad to buy the Acer Aspire One netbook at the bottom with a link to shopping.trustedreviews.com. An impartial article, this is not.
Reverse engineering may be prohibited by a license agreement even though it is not protected by the protection generally afforded to trade secrets in the US, where reverse engineering is usually permissible. With that said, though, an interesting but minor issue that popped up in one of the DVD Copy Control Association, Inc. v. Bunner cases is the burden of proof that reverse engineering has actually been carried out by the defendant.
Bear in mind that in the U.S., there is one area where reverse-engineering is against the law, and that's when reverse engineering with the (supposed) intent of circumventing copy protection; the DMCA. The DMCA is applicable to the case you noted here, but probably not here as the plaintiffs are alleging breach of contract rather than copyright infringement.
Sorry, but that sounds like conspiracy talk. To me, the white area looks like just a big newly-constructed concrete ramp. I've been seen and been to a lot of airports, so I know what a ramp looks like.
If you look at the top and bottom, you see areas that are still under construction. Some taxiways and even portions of the runway are bright white. What possible reason reason could they have for "whiting out" the runway's threshold and blast pads? The overall white area doesn't look anything like a building and all the actual buildings are arranged around it, just like any other airport. If you scroll around a bit, you'll see other areas that are nearly white but plainly older because they have streaks of gray running through them.
Back in the day, I understand that satellite photos used infrared to generate fairly visually-accurate monochrome images of the ground. On those, thick forests and bodies of water should show up black while roofs and roads would be a lot lighter. I would take a wild guess that the satellites which capture images these days use infrared to enhance the visible light photo and brand-new concrete reflects a whole bunch of the sun's infrared back at the camera. This oversaturates that area on the picture and makes objects on the concrete difficult to see. But that's just a theory. I'd appreciate hearing from someone who knows how it really works.
This is actually a far bigger deal than just some minor win for the open source. Most people don't understand that government software projects are their own huge industry. Whenever the military has a need for a specific application that doesn't exist (or even sometimes does), they solicit bids for the solution. These solutions are often something that many of us here can whip up in a weekend of hard coding, but because of the way government projects work, the company who wins the bid usually complicates the spec further, wastes time, extends the budget, and maybe delivers a proprietary half-assed end result while walking away with millions of taxpayer dollars.
Open source could, theoretically, sidestep this industry in many cases.
I was shopping for a laptop recently and decided that the MacBook Pro was the kind of laptop I was looking for, except it seemed a bit spendy. Next in line was the well-known ThinkPad which has a reputation for being rugged, well-built, and reliable, just like the MacBook Pro. So I compared the two online as closely as possible. I used the standard 15" MacBook as a reference and customized the ThinkPad accordingly because the reverse is much more difficult. Here's what I found.
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM Weight: 5.4 pounds Thickness: 1" Display: 1440 x 900 pixels Keyboard illumination: backlight Operating system: OS X Pointing device: Multi-touch trackpad Webcam: Yes Video output: DVI USB: 2 ports Firewire: 1x 400 port, 1x 800 port Expansion cards: 1x ExpressCard Audio In: optical, line, microphone Audio Out: optical, line, speakers Card reader: No Fingerprint reader: No Price: $2499
ThinkPad T61
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M (128MB) Weight: 5.0 lbs Thickness 1.2" Display: 1680x1050 Keyboard illumination: Overhead LED Operating system: Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium (default) Pointing device: Trackpad and trackpoint with buttons for each Webcam: No Video output: VGA USB: 3 Ports Firewire: 1x 400 port Expansion cards: 1x PC Card, 1x ExpressCard Audio in: line, microphone Audio out: headphones, speakers Card reader: 4 in 1 Fingerprint Reader: Yes Price: $1208
If you look just at computing power, the two are identical except that the MacBook Pro has a beefier graphics chipset. The rest of the advantages are mainly to do with better multimedia capabilities. (Except, curiously, screen resolution.) This could be worth more than double the cost of the ThinkPad if that's the kind of work you do. As a far more casual user and part-time hacker, I appreciated some of the more mundane enhancements that the ThinkPad offers at a much more attractive price: More ports, gizmos, and buttons.
Similarly, Bush being checked by the Democrats is actually more moderate because he has to be. When you have the other side of the aisle to contend with on a daily basis, you have to learn consensus to survive.
I can't bring myself to agree as I witness what I hope is the last great fuckup of his administration: the handing over of $700 billion dollars of taxpayer money to a select group of rich old white guys as a reward for screwing up our economy for their gain.
No multitouch. I'd figure with the next generation of smartphones with big screens this wouldve been a no-brainer.
If I'm not mistaken, multi-touch technology is so wrapped up in patents right now (everything from the screens themselves to the gestures you use to perform certain actions) that it's difficult to implement in anything that will actually make it to market without getting a bunch of lawsuits thrown at you. (Or paying out half your device cost in royalties.)
Second, multi-touch really isn't all that ground-breaking. I see it as similar to mouse gestures. Sure, both speed up certain actions but they don't give you anything that you can't do by making your UI a little better. Mouse gestures were once claimed to be the Next Big Thing, but hardly anyone actually uses them because it's just a novel way to make things slightly easier at the expense of committing to learn the gestures, some of which are not especially intuitive. The only multi-touch thing I actually ever see people do on the iPhone is zoom in and out to read web pages, which you really can't avoid because there's no other way to zoom.
As as exception to this, though, multi-touch does have loads of potential for digital artists in the fields of graphics design, computer animation, and music. (I'd love to get my hands on one of these.)
When will companies (organizations) realize that convenience, more than any other factor including price, is a primary differentiator? If you make it difficult, people will just move on to the next solution that is easy. This works for EULAs, DRM, product activation, installation, acquiring media, playing music... "Simple" wins every time.
If that were true, every PC in the world would have an Apple logo on the side.
Not that I'm a fan of Apple by any stretch of the imagination, but you can't argue that their overall user experience isn't anything short of top-notch. That's the one thing I will give them credit for.
Whenever I listen to international news, they refer to the U.S. economy as in recession. The U.S. media, however, always call it an "economic downturn" or "slow economy" or some other silly thing that basically means recession.
You joke, but this is sorta what happened to me. About 7 years ago, I moved into an area with no broadband available at all. Not long after, Comcast moved into the market. I signed up right away and even though I thought $60/month was expensive (even back then), I certainly enjoyed the solid and stable 5 mbit connection.
For a few months anyway. They kept signing up customers in the area without increasing capacity and after about six months, I was consistently getting better speeds on a backup dialup account than through Comcast. This was before P2P was really cool and I wasn't doing more than web browsing and downloading the occasional Linux CD. I suffered with around 2.0Kbps speeds for two months before I moved out of state and cancelled. Whenever I called, their technicians always said that they would send someone out to look at the problem but as far as I know, they never did.
To add insult to injury, they made me drive an hour to one of their service centers in a mall just to return the cable modem. (That is, if I didn't want an extra $100 charge or so on my final bill.)
Translation: If we don't keep America hooked on expensive impulse-bought gas-guzzling behemoths bought on credit by a busy soccer mom who fantasizes that a bigger vehicle will keep her precious snowflakes safe, who will?
I wonder what further bad will come out of Mozilla being too corporate. It starts to look like an elegant way of getting a paycheck and less like about making a good browser.
This is a good point. Many people laud Firefox as being the free, wonderful, open-source browser built by the community with the community's needs in mind, etc, etc. They fail to realize (or perhaps don't want to realize) that mozilla.com is a for-profit taxable corporation just like any other company out there.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing that companies are embracing open source and using it as a business model. I just want people to be aware that Firefox is a business model, not some open source wet dream come to life.
Cross-platform widget sets are always dreadful. An application developed using cross-platform widgets will, at best, work well on one platform, and more usually on no platforms. OS X and Windows have different UI philosophies, and an OS X application needs a different UI from a Windows application.
Not true. Qt4 is widely regarded as an excellent open source toolkit and does cross-platform very very well. And since they're using WebKit for the rendering engine (based on KTHML which was designed to work with Konqueror which was written with Qt to begin with), it would have been a snap to put the two together. I'm not a Qt fanboy or anything, but it boggles the mind why one wouldn't use Qt for any open source cross-platform development.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, get a grip. If you're talking about this airport (you didn't link directly to an airport so I had to scroll around for it), then it's an even better example of what I'm talking about. You can even see everything on this ramp because the white isn't as intense as Ramstein's obviously newer ramps.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that they've added some kind of infrared-reflecting coating to the ramps to make the planes on them harder to see on satellite photos (if so, it didn't help much) but these photos were definitely not digitally altered after the fact.
All good points, sir.
I probably should have clarified that yes, it's probably a good idea to get a police officer's attention in the event of a life-threatening emergency but that's pretty much where I myself would draw the line.
I've been looking at it this way:
1. Banks screw over gullible subprime buyers with shit mortgages that they know can't be paid back.
2. Banks screw over other banks by selling those shit mortgages to them.
3. The top shareholders who know the true value of these shit mortgages get out while they're ahead and walk away billions of dollars richer because they know someone's going to notice this eventually.
4. The banks that stayed thought they could keep duping people indefinitely but were finally left with all these shit mortgages and their businesses begin to crumble.
5. The economy tanks as it notices that banks are failing because of the shit mortgages.
6. The banks tell the government, "Hey guys, we need round about $700 billion to stay alive or else your economy is going tank further. Nevermind that it was our fault, just fix it for us, mkay"
Now, here's what I take away from that:
If we do nothing, some more banks fail and the economy continues to dive and the average citizen takes a financial hit until the market bounces back, which it will eventually.
If we hand over a $700 billion check to the banks, they continue to operate and the economy *might* bounce back a little quicker. But--and here's the rub--that $700 billion comes from taxpayers like you and me. So we still take a hit. And who does this $700 billion go to? Rich Wall Street types so they can continue doing their business and keeping the profits in the end.
I don't know about you, but as an average citizen, I feel like I've gotten screwed either way. The latter way twice. Since I have a good mortgage and a good job at a privately-held company that's doing great, I would much rather see the country take a little bit more of an economic hit than reward a bunch of rich bastards for first screwing over poor would-be homeowners and then the world's economy.
TDS also does this and it's one of the reasons I cancelled service and went with a more local DSL provider.
Remember kids, talking to police is not usually in your best interest. Be polite and complicit within your rights, but don't volunteer information.
Change that "usually" to "never" and you're spot on. You should never ever talk to the police about anything, period, unless you have your lawyer literally sitting right there beside you.
You think that's an extreme paranoid mindset? You think I'm some loony hippy anarchist? Then maybe you'd like to hear it straight from a law school professor and an actual police detective. If they're going to stand up there and advise you not to talk to the police under any circumstances, then why on earth would you?
They give a lot of good examples where you can conceivably incriminate yourself (or at least end up looking suspicious to a jury) even if you're completely innocent of any wrong-doing, were nowhere near a crime in your whole life, and have a bulletproof alibi for every second you're awake.
It all boils down to this: If you're stopped on the street by a cop who asks you a question, you say you can't help them and move on. If they block your path, you ask them if you're under arrest. If you're not under arrest, you move on. If you are arrested, you give them whatever information they need to put you in their files, and nothing else until your lawyer arrives, no matter how friendly or intimidating they act.
Remember also that police cannot search your property unless they have a court warrant, you consent to a search, or if they have probable cause. Don't consent to a search and don't have probable cause.
Don't get me wrong here, I have nothing personally against police themselves. There are surely many great police officers who catch the bad guys and help old ladies across the street. It's the system I distrust because there's no effective oversight of police power anywhere in this country and we keep seeing individuals as well as entire police departments abusing their authority whilst looking for people to shoot, intimidate, and lock up whether or not they did anything wrong.
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password.
I once heard someone say that only girls use Fedora, but until now I always figured it was just some kind of snide remark.
There are two solutions:
1. Leave the helpdesk job off your resume. If they ask why the gap, make something up.
2. So you've been working two years in helpdesk without being offered a promotion? Either the company's promotion process is broken or you are. Where I work, everybody starts out at helpdesk, no matter what position they are applying for. Even if it's just for a week or two, you start out answering phones and move up from there. Some people do, some don't, some actually like helpdesk.
Agreed. If you have an hour to waste by clicking on Next Page links to read a poorly-researched and graphics-heavy "article," then it's hard to go wrong here.
If you indeed are curious about the history of the net, this isn't a bad start.
Been waiting 10 years for a system to moderate Slashdot submissions and "editors" instead of just comments, guess I'll wait a while longer.
1. Cheap
2. Powerful
3. Portable
Pick one.
That said, it sounds like the author of TFA doesn't really know what he wants, and/or doesn't understand how computers are built. On the first page, he bemoans the cheap plastic toy-like look of the Eee PC and others while praising the solid professional construction of the MiniNote and then finally concludes that a professional business-class netbook should cost the same as your all-plastic Eee PC. Good luck with that particular wish.
There are tons of other inconsistencies as well, such as stating that he doesn't need video capability but then later saying that HDMI would be nice, so he could watch videos on a TV. Wot?
Finally, I have a huge time trusting a site called "Trusted Reviews" when every page of the review contains a prominent ad to buy the Acer Aspire One netbook at the bottom with a link to shopping.trustedreviews.com. An impartial article, this is not.
Bear in mind that in the U.S., there is one area where reverse-engineering is against the law, and that's when reverse engineering with the (supposed) intent of circumventing copy protection; the DMCA. The DMCA is applicable to the case you noted here, but probably not here as the plaintiffs are alleging breach of contract rather than copyright infringement.
Sorry, but that sounds like conspiracy talk. To me, the white area looks like just a big newly-constructed concrete ramp. I've been seen and been to a lot of airports, so I know what a ramp looks like.
If you look at the top and bottom, you see areas that are still under construction. Some taxiways and even portions of the runway are bright white. What possible reason reason could they have for "whiting out" the runway's threshold and blast pads? The overall white area doesn't look anything like a building and all the actual buildings are arranged around it, just like any other airport. If you scroll around a bit, you'll see other areas that are nearly white but plainly older because they have streaks of gray running through them.
Back in the day, I understand that satellite photos used infrared to generate fairly visually-accurate monochrome images of the ground. On those, thick forests and bodies of water should show up black while roofs and roads would be a lot lighter. I would take a wild guess that the satellites which capture images these days use infrared to enhance the visible light photo and brand-new concrete reflects a whole bunch of the sun's infrared back at the camera. This oversaturates that area on the picture and makes objects on the concrete difficult to see. But that's just a theory. I'd appreciate hearing from someone who knows how it really works.
This is actually a far bigger deal than just some minor win for the open source. Most people don't understand that government software projects are their own huge industry. Whenever the military has a need for a specific application that doesn't exist (or even sometimes does), they solicit bids for the solution. These solutions are often something that many of us here can whip up in a weekend of hard coding, but because of the way government projects work, the company who wins the bid usually complicates the spec further, wastes time, extends the budget, and maybe delivers a proprietary half-assed end result while walking away with millions of taxpayer dollars.
Open source could, theoretically, sidestep this industry in many cases.
No Apple premium, you say? +/-$100 you say?
I was shopping for a laptop recently and decided that the MacBook Pro was the kind of laptop I was looking for, except it seemed a bit spendy. Next in line was the well-known ThinkPad which has a reputation for being rugged, well-built, and reliable, just like the MacBook Pro. So I compared the two online as closely as possible. I used the standard 15" MacBook as a reference and customized the ThinkPad accordingly because the reverse is much more difficult. Here's what I found.
Both Laptops have:
Screen physical dimension: 15"
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz
Memory: 2GB (2x 1G)
HDD: 250GB SATA, 5400rpm
Optical drive: 8x dual-layer recordable DVD
Wifi: 802.11n
Bluetooth: Yes
Ethernet: Gigabit
Battery life: About 5hrs
Macbook Pro
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM
Weight: 5.4 pounds
Thickness: 1"
Display: 1440 x 900 pixels
Keyboard illumination: backlight
Operating system: OS X
Pointing device: Multi-touch trackpad
Webcam: Yes
Video output: DVI
USB: 2 ports
Firewire: 1x 400 port, 1x 800 port
Expansion cards: 1x ExpressCard
Audio In: optical, line, microphone
Audio Out: optical, line, speakers
Card reader: No
Fingerprint reader: No
Price: $2499
ThinkPad T61
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M (128MB)
Weight: 5.0 lbs
Thickness 1.2"
Display: 1680x1050
Keyboard illumination: Overhead LED
Operating system: Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium (default)
Pointing device: Trackpad and trackpoint with buttons for each
Webcam: No
Video output: VGA
USB: 3 Ports
Firewire: 1x 400 port
Expansion cards: 1x PC Card, 1x ExpressCard
Audio in: line, microphone
Audio out: headphones, speakers
Card reader: 4 in 1
Fingerprint Reader: Yes
Price: $1208
If you look just at computing power, the two are identical except that the MacBook Pro has a beefier graphics chipset. The rest of the advantages are mainly to do with better multimedia capabilities. (Except, curiously, screen resolution.) This could be worth more than double the cost of the ThinkPad if that's the kind of work you do. As a far more casual user and part-time hacker, I appreciated some of the more mundane enhancements that the ThinkPad offers at a much more attractive price: More ports, gizmos, and buttons.
Similarly, Bush being checked by the Democrats is actually more moderate because he has to be. When you have the other side of the aisle to contend with on a daily basis, you have to learn consensus to survive.
I can't bring myself to agree as I witness what I hope is the last great fuckup of his administration: the handing over of $700 billion dollars of taxpayer money to a select group of rich old white guys as a reward for screwing up our economy for their gain.
If I'm not mistaken, multi-touch technology is so wrapped up in patents right now (everything from the screens themselves to the gestures you use to perform certain actions) that it's difficult to implement in anything that will actually make it to market without getting a bunch of lawsuits thrown at you. (Or paying out half your device cost in royalties.)
Second, multi-touch really isn't all that ground-breaking. I see it as similar to mouse gestures. Sure, both speed up certain actions but they don't give you anything that you can't do by making your UI a little better. Mouse gestures were once claimed to be the Next Big Thing, but hardly anyone actually uses them because it's just a novel way to make things slightly easier at the expense of committing to learn the gestures, some of which are not especially intuitive. The only multi-touch thing I actually ever see people do on the iPhone is zoom in and out to read web pages, which you really can't avoid because there's no other way to zoom.
As as exception to this, though, multi-touch does have loads of potential for digital artists in the fields of graphics design, computer animation, and music. (I'd love to get my hands on one of these.)
... don't mind that club he's holding.
If that were true, every PC in the world would have an Apple logo on the side.
Not that I'm a fan of Apple by any stretch of the imagination, but you can't argue that their overall user experience isn't anything short of top-notch. That's the one thing I will give them credit for.
Let's just call it what it is: a recession.
Whenever I listen to international news, they refer to the U.S. economy as in recession. The U.S. media, however, always call it an "economic downturn" or "slow economy" or some other silly thing that basically means recession.
You joke, but this is sorta what happened to me. About 7 years ago, I moved into an area with no broadband available at all. Not long after, Comcast moved into the market. I signed up right away and even though I thought $60/month was expensive (even back then), I certainly enjoyed the solid and stable 5 mbit connection.
For a few months anyway. They kept signing up customers in the area without increasing capacity and after about six months, I was consistently getting better speeds on a backup dialup account than through Comcast. This was before P2P was really cool and I wasn't doing more than web browsing and downloading the occasional Linux CD. I suffered with around 2.0Kbps speeds for two months before I moved out of state and cancelled. Whenever I called, their technicians always said that they would send someone out to look at the problem but as far as I know, they never did.
To add insult to injury, they made me drive an hour to one of their service centers in a mall just to return the cable modem. (That is, if I didn't want an extra $100 charge or so on my final bill.)
... but 2008 is looking pretty good.
That bullseye had been painted there long ago, buddy.
Translation: If we don't keep America hooked on expensive impulse-bought gas-guzzling behemoths bought on credit by a busy soccer mom who fantasizes that a bigger vehicle will keep her precious snowflakes safe, who will?
(Disclaimer: I am American.)
This is a good point. Many people laud Firefox as being the free, wonderful, open-source browser built by the community with the community's needs in mind, etc, etc. They fail to realize (or perhaps don't want to realize) that mozilla.com is a for-profit taxable corporation just like any other company out there.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing that companies are embracing open source and using it as a business model. I just want people to be aware that Firefox is a business model, not some open source wet dream come to life.
Not true. Qt4 is widely regarded as an excellent open source toolkit and does cross-platform very very well. And since they're using WebKit for the rendering engine (based on KTHML which was designed to work with Konqueror which was written with Qt to begin with), it would have been a snap to put the two together. I'm not a Qt fanboy or anything, but it boggles the mind why one wouldn't use Qt for any open source cross-platform development.
HTTPS much?