I believe the truth of this matter was that Firefox, for reasons of compatibility, were developing on the older (frozen) 1.7(.5 maybe, I forget!) rendering engine. This was in case something in their interface was broken when they moved to the newer engine, presumably, since they were seriously working to get 1.0 out on time. As you mention, this is a rendering bug - the rendering engine (Gecko) is designed on the trunk. The next version of Firefox (as shown in those pretty graphs, posted here just yesterday) is devoted to introducing the 1.8 version of Gecko, which has this bug fixed (I believe it's fixed in the Nightly versions of the trunk already, or at least Bugzilla thinks so).
The bottom line here, though, is that this is a Gecko bug, rather than a specific Firefox one. The Firefox crew do not develop Gecko, so strictly speaking, it is an external bug. One that's been fixed. They just haven't incorporated the new version yet (and won't, until it reaches 1.8, apparently).
An interesting point, though, is that in a few of those examples MS did not stop developing until it was better than what they were competing with - Direct3D (although I'm led to believe that OpenGL is catching up again now) and IE (IE was superior to Netscape when they stopped developing it aeons ago).
WTF? Windows XP help is about as useful a brick in solving problems. It's of the "Did you check that the printer is turned on? Yes? Oh sorry we can't help you" variety.
99% of the time, these will fix the problem that the users that this article was written for are experiencing.
Don't underestimate the number of difficulties that non-technical users find, particularly if they choose to skip the instructions at first.
This is gonna sound pedantic, but the name "Antitrust" is derived from monopolistic business cartels at the time that the legislation was written, which were then called "trusts".
Thats the battle right now, will the future be around the computer or the TV?
How long do you think there will be a difference between the two? Televisions are getting more "interactive" features all the time. New DVD-like standards, if I recall, occasional for the use of embedded Java systems... The technologies are converging all the time. I think that you'll continue to have a seperate computer and TV (or "Media Centre", or whatever), simply because the most convenient control methods are so different, although technologically they may not be very different at all.
Thanks for posting this, it saves me the trouble! Another interesting point is that, although it's true that we do have a £1 note, only one (RBoS) actually still print them, which is part of the reason they're so rare.
Another point is that SQL is more limited in expressive power than XML - foreign keys can redress some of the difference, but not even nearly all. XML is Turing-complete, and SQL can only query on first-order predicates, if I remember correctly.
This is why XML query optimisation is so difficult, and why there's so much work still going into it.
Do you maybe mean an exploit in Windows' built-in zip extractor? WinZip, although popular, is probably used by less naive users who would be vulnerable to this sort of attack.
Cheers for the info, though.
Right, sorry for the double reply, but I got curious and extracted it myself. The main "guts" of the extension contains:
An XUL file which adds the menu and the JS file to the browser window.
An XUL "About" page for the extension which has no scripting whatsoever other than a window.open call that links to Speakeasy when you click their link
A JS file with some calls that make the "throbber" (wee animated bit in the top right) link to speakeasy.net, and some code which is called when the Speakeasy menu's buttons are clicked, which does nothing but open the links in the current browser window if mousebutton is 0 (left or main), or a new tab otherwise.
And that's it. The rest of the archive contains RDF files to help Firefox install the extension, and some PNG, GIF and CSS files for styling.
If you rename the.xpi file to.zip, you can extract it and find out;)
Mozilla extensions are nearly always written purely in JavaScript and XUL. You might (read: will) need to extract a couple of.jar files, but since it's a scripting language, the source is all there.
A good point. And, despite its occasional (serious) security flaw, you still have to whitelist most ActiveX-based malwares. I guess it's only a matter of time -- this is just what happens when "good software" goes mainstream. Abuse becomes rife.
I agree - however, you won't really notice the speed/memory usage issues until you're on a much older PC (I use Firefox on all my boxes). Even speed-optimised FF builds will probably not be able to fully compare to K-Meleon on a really old system - as such, it's a good way for someone with really old hardware to get themselves a modern, standards-compliant browser.
Fair dues, I often lose bits with all the posts on here. I just think a lot of people over-simplify the patents issue - it's not as one-sided as it's often made out to be. It wouldn't be contentious if it was.
I know this is getting desperately offtopic, but device drivers and other random kernel modules aside, shouldn't most actual software run fairly easily on either system? If lots of GNU/Linux software can be made to work on other *nix environments, why is Hurd different?
Not trying to defend it or anything (although I'm one of those crazy people who's hung up on Linux being monolithic, but let's not get into that now), I'm just curious what - other than hardware support and lower-level things - is actually in GNU/Linux to make software so incompatible?
Now, although software patents are quite the point of contention with many (including myself), your arguments here are quite hollow. If your arguments are valid, they apply to all patents. There is no fundamental difference between the method in which a washing machine works and the algorithm used to compress MP3 audio in this context, save that the MP3 algorithm probably took more man-hours to develop.
Just because some people choose not to patent their algorithms (and they should be applauded for doing so) doesn't mean that everyone must follow suit. I live in Europe, and I'm against the introduction of such patents here, but to try and claim that algorithms do not take "time and effort" to develop is an affront to computer scientists and software engineers everywhere.
I think it's based on the idea that something which is optimised for speed is "geekier". Since K-Meleon has a native Windows (non-XUL) frontend, it runs faster.
A lot of the problems with Windows security is that "fixing" much of it will make user's computers just stop working as they expect. I'm not going to defend their email and browser products, but Windows is in an interesting quandary with security.
As for Spyware (which is what I thought the article was about), it's not significantly more difficult to implement on GNU/Linux than Windows -- the main obstacles are the more-experienced users and the lack of actual profit in such an endeavour. The only real technical hitch is that it's much more difficult to install such an app for "all users" on a *nix box than on Windows (thanks to the default Administrator priveleges), but on most desktop systems this will be moot, as either they are single user, or the "host" application will be being installed for all users which will require root priveleges.
I personally see the faults that Spyware exploits more as faults in user knowledge than the underlying system.
1) The success of Netflix. People are willing to hold any 3 movites for as long as they want. Delete the old one, and get a new one. Charge a subscription fee, and done.
Another possible model is that once you pay for a movie, you "own" it, and can redownload it at any time you choose. This is the model that Valve's "Steam" software distribution service works under. Of course, you want to hold as many as possible on your system, but if there's some you hardly ever watch, you can safely remove them, knowing that they can be recovered if you wish to see them again (although, of course, you better know in advance!).
Traditional filesharing apps over a VPN of some type might work here? I've never had to use VPNs on Macs so I'm not sure of the details, to be completely honest. It would be nice to have a cross-platform WASTE client, I agree - I like that system.
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I believe the truth of this matter was that Firefox, for reasons of compatibility, were developing on the older (frozen) 1.7(.5 maybe, I forget!) rendering engine. This was in case something in their interface was broken when they moved to the newer engine, presumably, since they were seriously working to get 1.0 out on time. As you mention, this is a rendering bug - the rendering engine (Gecko) is designed on the trunk. The next version of Firefox (as shown in those pretty graphs, posted here just yesterday) is devoted to introducing the 1.8 version of Gecko, which has this bug fixed (I believe it's fixed in the Nightly versions of the trunk already, or at least Bugzilla thinks so).
The bottom line here, though, is that this is a Gecko bug, rather than a specific Firefox one. The Firefox crew do not develop Gecko, so strictly speaking, it is an external bug. One that's been fixed. They just haven't incorporated the new version yet (and won't, until it reaches 1.8, apparently).
Regardless of books, he's actually fairly correct there. Implicit conversions are the opposite of strong typing.
How this relates to perl exactly (I just want to make clear that I know nothing about its type system) I won't claim to know, though.
An interesting point, though, is that in a few of those examples MS did not stop developing until it was better than what they were competing with - Direct3D (although I'm led to believe that OpenGL is catching up again now) and IE (IE was superior to Netscape when they stopped developing it aeons ago).
Don't underestimate the number of difficulties that non-technical users find, particularly if they choose to skip the instructions at first.
This is gonna sound pedantic, but the name "Antitrust" is derived from monopolistic business cartels at the time that the legislation was written, which were then called "trusts".
Thanks for posting this, it saves me the trouble! Another interesting point is that, although it's true that we do have a £1 note, only one (RBoS) actually still print them, which is part of the reason they're so rare.
Another point is that SQL is more limited in expressive power than XML - foreign keys can redress some of the difference, but not even nearly all. XML is Turing-complete, and SQL can only query on first-order predicates, if I remember correctly.
This is why XML query optimisation is so difficult, and why there's so much work still going into it.
Do you maybe mean an exploit in Windows' built-in zip extractor? WinZip, although popular, is probably used by less naive users who would be vulnerable to this sort of attack. Cheers for the info, though.
Doesn't MyDoom distribute itself as a (valid) passworded .zip file to get past virus checkers?
- An XUL file which adds the menu and the JS file to the browser window.
- An XUL "About" page for the extension which has no scripting whatsoever other than a window.open call that links to Speakeasy when you click their link
- A JS file with some calls that make the "throbber" (wee animated bit in the top right) link to speakeasy.net, and some code which is called when the Speakeasy menu's buttons are clicked, which does nothing but open the links in the current browser window if mousebutton is 0 (left or main), or a new tab otherwise.
And that's it. The rest of the archive contains RDF files to help Firefox install the extension, and some PNG, GIF and CSS files for styling.If you rename the .xpi file to .zip, you can extract it and find out ;)
Mozilla extensions are nearly always written purely in JavaScript and XUL. You might (read: will) need to extract a couple of .jar files, but since it's a scripting language, the source is all there.
A good point. And, despite its occasional (serious) security flaw, you still have to whitelist most ActiveX-based malwares. I guess it's only a matter of time -- this is just what happens when "good software" goes mainstream. Abuse becomes rife.
I agree - however, you won't really notice the speed/memory usage issues until you're on a much older PC (I use Firefox on all my boxes). Even speed-optimised FF builds will probably not be able to fully compare to K-Meleon on a really old system - as such, it's a good way for someone with really old hardware to get themselves a modern, standards-compliant browser.
Fair dues, I often lose bits with all the posts on here. I just think a lot of people over-simplify the patents issue - it's not as one-sided as it's often made out to be. It wouldn't be contentious if it was.
I know this is getting desperately offtopic, but device drivers and other random kernel modules aside, shouldn't most actual software run fairly easily on either system? If lots of GNU/Linux software can be made to work on other *nix environments, why is Hurd different?
Not trying to defend it or anything (although I'm one of those crazy people who's hung up on Linux being monolithic, but let's not get into that now), I'm just curious what - other than hardware support and lower-level things - is actually in GNU/Linux to make software so incompatible?
Now, although software patents are quite the point of contention with many (including myself), your arguments here are quite hollow. If your arguments are valid, they apply to all patents. There is no fundamental difference between the method in which a washing machine works and the algorithm used to compress MP3 audio in this context, save that the MP3 algorithm probably took more man-hours to develop.
Just because some people choose not to patent their algorithms (and they should be applauded for doing so) doesn't mean that everyone must follow suit. I live in Europe, and I'm against the introduction of such patents here, but to try and claim that algorithms do not take "time and effort" to develop is an affront to computer scientists and software engineers everywhere.
I think it's based on the idea that something which is optimised for speed is "geekier". Since K-Meleon has a native Windows (non-XUL) frontend, it runs faster.
A lot of the problems with Windows security is that "fixing" much of it will make user's computers just stop working as they expect. I'm not going to defend their email and browser products, but Windows is in an interesting quandary with security.
As for Spyware (which is what I thought the article was about), it's not significantly more difficult to implement on GNU/Linux than Windows -- the main obstacles are the more-experienced users and the lack of actual profit in such an endeavour. The only real technical hitch is that it's much more difficult to install such an app for "all users" on a *nix box than on Windows (thanks to the default Administrator priveleges), but on most desktop systems this will be moot, as either they are single user, or the "host" application will be being installed for all users which will require root priveleges.
I personally see the faults that Spyware exploits more as faults in user knowledge than the underlying system.
1) The success of Netflix. People are willing to hold any 3 movites for as long as they want. Delete the old one, and get a new one. Charge a subscription fee, and done.
Another possible model is that once you pay for a movie, you "own" it, and can redownload it at any time you choose. This is the model that Valve's "Steam" software distribution service works under. Of course, you want to hold as many as possible on your system, but if there's some you hardly ever watch, you can safely remove them, knowing that they can be recovered if you wish to see them again (although, of course, you better know in advance!).
Traditional filesharing apps over a VPN of some type might work here? I've never had to use VPNs on Macs so I'm not sure of the details, to be completely honest. It would be nice to have a cross-platform WASTE client, I agree - I like that system.
I heard another place that it may reinstall the CyDoor system when it starts if it has been previously removed. Worth checking.
"I've been squeezing this rock for hours, but it's just not bleeding."