Normally I'm not one to bother responding to ACs, but what in the hell are you talking about?
Yahoo handed over Chinese bloggers.
Google has only handed over private info on their users once and that was after REPEATED court orders. They didn't even comply with the first order from a judge.
The info they eventually handed over was a ring of users sharing child pornography on Orkut.
I've literally had this exact same conversation several times on Slashdot before, and not once has anyone provided a single ounce of proof that Google hands over your private data, save for that one instance.
Google was the only major search engine to fight to protect your privacy.
Google also fought court orders in Brazil to protect privacy for their Orkut users.
I can understand the logic of a statement that only criminals have something to hide, but in practice, Google has done more to protect your privacy than Microsoft. That is just comparing them as search companies. I won't even get into Windows and Microsoft products "phoning home" without telling you, and the latest rumors that Microsoft included a backdoor in Windows 7 for the NSA.
Here is the problem with most businesses, is that often the lowest paid employees handle customer service. Should IT departments focus more on good customer service, even if their "customers" are fellow employees in the company? Certainly. But this is a failing of all businesses.
Focusing on customer service may in fact entail paying more to hire better employees, and spending cash on training. How many businesses are doing this?
I believe Chrome 4 beta does it today. I recommend AdThwart extension with it, but sadly it still renders the ad in the background and hides it. Running Chrome on Windows, I find files downloading and trying to open that I didn't download. I've seen executables try to open themselves. Firefox and Adblock plus stops the ad from rendering at all, which blocks a lot of that crap.
Chrome is nice, but until I can get a better ad blocking solution, I'm largely sticking with Firefox.
Spend a little time reading this on a regular basis, and you'll soon discover how many projects Mozilla handles, and all the developers they're paying.
The big projects include:
Firefox, Bugzilla, Camino, Fennec, Lightning, Sunbird, Seamonkey, and Thunderbird.
These are major multi-platform projects.
Mozilla has several projects for first-party add-ons for all of the above such as Firebug, Chromebug, . Then they have tons of major projects that most people never hear about. At the moment they're working on:
Jetpack Raindrop Bespin Concept Personas Prism Snowl Test Pilot Ubiquity Weave Electrolysis
A tool recently said the KDE code based purely on lines of code should have cost $175 million to develop, and that wasn't counting Koffice, and anything outside the main KDE trunk.
Mozilla also doesn't just do code projects, they do tons of community management and outreach projects like Mozilla Education, which costs even more money.
They also help support outside developers using Mozilla and Xulrunner for other apps such as Kompozer, Songbird, etc.
I don't know where all their money goes, but Mozilla does *A LOT*. To suggest they're not doing much development is ignorance or lies.
Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes and memory hogging, and has for years.
Firefox does crash for me from time to time, on Windows and Linux. I tend to use a lot of extensions, and the most common thing I hear is that extensions are the largest source of memory and stability issues. Do I get daily crashes, or 10 crashes a day? No. And I run daily snapshot builds. I maybe get 1 crash a week, if that.
As a Systems Engineer, I troubleshoot and support some big money apps that crash fairly often. Large software projects are going to have bugs. However, I wager if you run without extensions, you'll find that Firefox is pretty damned stable for such a massive multi-platform app.
Memory issues are all but lies these days. Memory usage has improved so much over the past few years. Firefox is actually better with memory usage than Chrome in many ways. The core app doesn't take too much memory on first load. It doesn't have memory leaks.
There are some intentional features which cause Firefox to eat up some memory that you can turn off, such as Firefox keeping fully rendered pages in memory, so that when you hit the back button, they just display immediately without having to re-render. When you close a tab, it still keeps that full session in memory for some time, so that you can reopen the closed tab with full rendered pages and history if you want.
If you don't like these features, turn them off. Not to mention, these are set to use dynamic chunks of memory which is preportional to your total memory. If you have a desktop with 8 gigs of memory that you're not using, why get upset that Firefox is using 300-400 megs of memory?
Unused memory isn't doing you any good.
Stop with the FUD. Real geeks know better and see right through BS and lies.
ReiserFS is in mainline, and is maintained by the kernel developers. Resier and Namesys all but abandoned it, which is one of many factors that kept the newer Reiser4 out of mainline, even though Reiser4 was superior to ReiserFS in many ways.
Your numbers show that Microsoft went from 96% market share to 90% market share. All that does is prove my point.
They're losing market share.
When Firefox was at 10% market share and slowly chipping away, people scoffed at it and said, "well, IE still has 90% market share, so who cares about the trend?"
How did that turn out?
Again, Google has deals with tons of major vendors and retailers. Currently the cheap PC market is all Windows. When Google suddenly dominates the cheap netbook market with a Linux variant, I can't imagine Microsoft will be super-pleased. And if Microsoft has to start giving away licenses for $10, or for free to compete with the free Chrome license, that certainly won't help the profit margins for Microsoft.
PC costs keep dropping. Dell can't hide a $50 Microsoft tax in a $250 netbook as easily. Either Microsoft kills their profit margin and charges next to nothing for Windows, or they lose market share.
You insist complementary sales are important. With Google bringing some main-stream credibility to Linux's already strong hardware support, pretty soon you'll find more and more hardware working on Linux.
You can still sell a digital camera or webcam with a Linux notebook. In fact, they might be easier to use on Linux than on Windows. Plug them in, and they work.
It certainly doesn't help that Microsoft basically paid Best Buy employees to lie, but more and more people are turning to geeks they know for advice, and buying products online. Every year, retail stores sell less, and online retailers sell more.
Does anyone have numbers to compare from 10 years ago?
Revenue should scale up with inflation and standard growth. I'm particularly curious about profit margin, and market share.
In this past decade Microsoft lost market share, presided over the Xbox's massive hardware failures, and the massive failure of Windows mobile. IE went from utterly dominating (95% plus) market share to having less than 50% market share in some areas. Most people expect Firefox to overtake the majority of market share in all markets. Microsoft has also lost market share in search, got blasted by the EU, and had to back-pedal on several key strategies.
All those things go on his resume.
Microsoft also has to look where the future takes them.
A linux netbook with a random distro without many packages, and no big brand name behind it may not set the world on fire. But when Best Buy starts selling Chrome OS netbooks with a big Google brand on it, Microsoft will start shitting themselves.
Google has a lot of pieces they've yet to put together, but when they do, Microsoft's business model in several markets may suddenly shrivel and dissapear. Microsoft won't disappear overnight because they're diversified, but a company can rule a specific market one day, and then disappear the next if they're not careful.
The trailer is terrible, but apparently the dialogue is such a hard R, that they had a hard time cutting a trailer around it. That looks like a Lethal Weapon to me. It looks absolutely nothing like he has done before.
His next movie after that will either by "Hit Somebody", a sports flick about hockey, or "Red State", which he describes as a very dark psychological horror film.
I think that while Smith has been making the same type of films for some time, he seems to have come to the same conclusion, and now he is trying something else.
I think Luthor suspects the kid, but it has been a while since I seen Returns.
Singer said publicly that he was making his film as a direct sequel to Superman 1 and 2, but not really considering 3 and 4. Those movies are fairly old, and if you didn't see them, I guess it wouldn't be pretty clear where the kid came from, or why Lois didn't know.
Superman 2 is a great film, and held up (even today, though it is a little slow by modern standards) by some as the best superhero film of all time. I'll take Dark Knight, but Superman 2 is worth watching at least once. I assume most geeks have seen it.
They've hired some strong vets down in Austin who have worked on MMOs for years and years, including the first major MMO in Ultima Online.
Bioware is behind this. They're promising to bring their style of single-player story arcs to the MMO genre. They said they were not going to do an MMO until they were convinced they could do it right. Like Blizzard, they are a studio that holds themselves to a pretty high standard.
The "trailers" are nothing short of amazing.
They're focusing on an era that many fans love, and haves tons of Sith and Jedi, where as Galaxies mishandled Jedi.
Galaxies was pretty bad to begin with, but had some fans. They they completely changed the game to try and appease people who didn't like it, and in the process alienated the few who did like it.
Lois is genuinely shocked that her son displays super powers. The real key is understanding this is a direct sequel to Superman 2. In that film, Superman becomes a normal mortal, sleeps with Lois, but then wipes her memory at the end.
Lois has no memory of sleeping with Supes. Why would she assume it is his kid? She is a single gal with no memory of a romance with Supes, hooks up with a guy, gets pregnant, and has no reason to assume the kid is someone else's.
The fucked up part is that Supes screwed Lois and then wiped her memory in part 2. Shouldn't there be a scene in Returns where she goes to the hospital and says "I have no memory of us having sex? Did you rape me?"
He didn't leave after the kid. He comes back and is shocked to discover that Lois has a kid and fiance. For all anyone knows, that kid isn't Supes. Until the end, what reason does Supes have to assume the kid is his.
Not to mention, Supes never lifts anything with TK once that I've seen. And if his powers were purely mental and simply believing in them, then he wouldn't be powered by the sun.
I'm one of the few that rather liked the last Superman film. The major problem was a lack of action, and a ridiculous plot hole at the end (landing on the kryptonite land mass nearly killed him, but later he can lift a giant kryptonite continent with no problems).
I think Singer absolutely loves Superman, and did the character justice. He is a giant boy scout who feels ultimately alone. Superman's weaknesses extend past Kryptonite. Superman's powers can't help with Louis leaving him. But in having a kid, he suddenly doesn't feel as alone.
The Donner Superman films dealt with Marlon Brando saying goodbye to his son, who he sends to Earth. I thought Singer's Superman did a good job of integrating Brando's father/son arc.
People forget but Singer's first X-Men film didn't have good action. The second was CONSIDERABLY better. I would have liked to see Singer get a second shot at Superman.
Kevin Smith's problem isn't failure. All of his films turn a profit, and then sell like mad on DVD. He doesn't make 200 million in the box office, but he almost always shoots with a very low budget.
There is something to be said for a director who always turns a profit. Kevin Smith will never make a billion dollar picture like The Dark Knight, be he also won't lose you 200 million on a failed tent-pole.
Warner Brothers flat out said the next Superman needed to be dark and mimic The Dark Knight. Apparently they can't grasp that Superman and Batman are different characters.
Robert Pattison (or whatever that Twilight actor's name) is likely the next, emo, brooding, dark Peter Parker.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally I'm not one to bother responding to ACs, but what in the hell are you talking about?
Yahoo handed over Chinese bloggers.
Google has only handed over private info on their users once and that was after REPEATED court orders. They didn't even comply with the first order from a judge.
The info they eventually handed over was a ring of users sharing child pornography on Orkut.
I've literally had this exact same conversation several times on Slashdot before, and not once has anyone provided a single ounce of proof that Google hands over your private data, save for that one instance.
Microsoft handed over search data without being forced to do so.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/government/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177102061
Google was the only major search engine to fight to protect your privacy.
Google also fought court orders in Brazil to protect privacy for their Orkut users.
I can understand the logic of a statement that only criminals have something to hide, but in practice, Google has done more to protect your privacy than Microsoft. That is just comparing them as search companies. I won't even get into Windows and Microsoft products "phoning home" without telling you, and the latest rumors that Microsoft included a backdoor in Windows 7 for the NSA.
Here is the problem with most businesses, is that often the lowest paid employees handle customer service. Should IT departments focus more on good customer service, even if their "customers" are fellow employees in the company? Certainly. But this is a failing of all businesses.
Focusing on customer service may in fact entail paying more to hire better employees, and spending cash on training. How many businesses are doing this?
I really enjoy that in Vista and 7, Windows Update is a standalone app. I don't have to fire up IE to grab updates.
They are taking that into account for the future now. There are two projects to address that.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes
Jetpack
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Jetpack
Run nightly trunk and you can have it today.
I believe Chrome 4 beta does it today. I recommend AdThwart extension with it, but sadly it still renders the ad in the background and hides it. Running Chrome on Windows, I find files downloading and trying to open that I didn't download. I've seen executables try to open themselves. Firefox and Adblock plus stops the ad from rendering at all, which blocks a lot of that crap.
Chrome is nice, but until I can get a better ad blocking solution, I'm largely sticking with Firefox.
Have you seen $200 million worth of development in Firefox?
http://planet.mozilla.org/
Spend a little time reading this on a regular basis, and you'll soon discover how many projects Mozilla handles, and all the developers they're paying.
The big projects include:
Firefox, Bugzilla, Camino, Fennec, Lightning, Sunbird, Seamonkey, and Thunderbird.
These are major multi-platform projects.
Mozilla has several projects for first-party add-ons for all of the above such as Firebug, Chromebug, . Then they have tons of major projects that most people never hear about. At the moment they're working on:
Jetpack
Raindrop
Bespin
Concept
Personas
Prism
Snowl
Test Pilot
Ubiquity
Weave
Electrolysis
A tool recently said the KDE code based purely on lines of code should have cost $175 million to develop, and that wasn't counting Koffice, and anything outside the main KDE trunk.
Mozilla also doesn't just do code projects, they do tons of community management and outreach projects like Mozilla Education, which costs even more money.
They also help support outside developers using Mozilla and Xulrunner for other apps such as Kompozer, Songbird, etc.
I don't know where all their money goes, but Mozilla does *A LOT*. To suggest they're not doing much development is ignorance or lies.
Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes and memory hogging, and has for years.
Firefox does crash for me from time to time, on Windows and Linux. I tend to use a lot of extensions, and the most common thing I hear is that extensions are the largest source of memory and stability issues. Do I get daily crashes, or 10 crashes a day? No. And I run daily snapshot builds. I maybe get 1 crash a week, if that.
As a Systems Engineer, I troubleshoot and support some big money apps that crash fairly often. Large software projects are going to have bugs. However, I wager if you run without extensions, you'll find that Firefox is pretty damned stable for such a massive multi-platform app.
Memory issues are all but lies these days. Memory usage has improved so much over the past few years. Firefox is actually better with memory usage than Chrome in many ways. The core app doesn't take too much memory on first load. It doesn't have memory leaks.
There are some intentional features which cause Firefox to eat up some memory that you can turn off, such as Firefox keeping fully rendered pages in memory, so that when you hit the back button, they just display immediately without having to re-render. When you close a tab, it still keeps that full session in memory for some time, so that you can reopen the closed tab with full rendered pages and history if you want.
If you don't like these features, turn them off. Not to mention, these are set to use dynamic chunks of memory which is preportional to your total memory. If you have a desktop with 8 gigs of memory that you're not using, why get upset that Firefox is using 300-400 megs of memory?
Unused memory isn't doing you any good.
Stop with the FUD. Real geeks know better and see right through BS and lies.
I liked Reiser4 and ran it for a few years. If they continue to improve it, and get it in mainline, I might use it again.
ReiserFS is in mainline, and is maintained by the kernel developers. Resier and Namesys all but abandoned it, which is one of many factors that kept the newer Reiser4 out of mainline, even though Reiser4 was superior to ReiserFS in many ways.
Your numbers show that Microsoft went from 96% market share to 90% market share. All that does is prove my point.
They're losing market share.
When Firefox was at 10% market share and slowly chipping away, people scoffed at it and said, "well, IE still has 90% market share, so who cares about the trend?"
How did that turn out?
Again, Google has deals with tons of major vendors and retailers. Currently the cheap PC market is all Windows. When Google suddenly dominates the cheap netbook market with a Linux variant, I can't imagine Microsoft will be super-pleased. And if Microsoft has to start giving away licenses for $10, or for free to compete with the free Chrome license, that certainly won't help the profit margins for Microsoft.
PC costs keep dropping. Dell can't hide a $50 Microsoft tax in a $250 netbook as easily. Either Microsoft kills their profit margin and charges next to nothing for Windows, or they lose market share.
You insist complementary sales are important. With Google bringing some main-stream credibility to Linux's already strong hardware support, pretty soon you'll find more and more hardware working on Linux.
You can still sell a digital camera or webcam with a Linux notebook. In fact, they might be easier to use on Linux than on Windows. Plug them in, and they work.
It certainly doesn't help that Microsoft basically paid Best Buy employees to lie, but more and more people are turning to geeks they know for advice, and buying products online. Every year, retail stores sell less, and online retailers sell more.
Does anyone have numbers to compare from 10 years ago?
Revenue should scale up with inflation and standard growth. I'm particularly curious about profit margin, and market share.
In this past decade Microsoft lost market share, presided over the Xbox's massive hardware failures, and the massive failure of Windows mobile. IE went from utterly dominating (95% plus) market share to having less than 50% market share in some areas. Most people expect Firefox to overtake the majority of market share in all markets. Microsoft has also lost market share in search, got blasted by the EU, and had to back-pedal on several key strategies.
All those things go on his resume.
Microsoft also has to look where the future takes them.
A linux netbook with a random distro without many packages, and no big brand name behind it may not set the world on fire. But when Best Buy starts selling Chrome OS netbooks with a big Google brand on it, Microsoft will start shitting themselves.
Google has a lot of pieces they've yet to put together, but when they do, Microsoft's business model in several markets may suddenly shrivel and dissapear. Microsoft won't disappear overnight because they're diversified, but a company can rule a specific market one day, and then disappear the next if they're not careful.
It was a pane in the glass.
You should see his next movie that's coming out:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/copout/
The trailer is terrible, but apparently the dialogue is such a hard R, that they had a hard time cutting a trailer around it. That looks like a Lethal Weapon to me. It looks absolutely nothing like he has done before.
His next movie after that will either by "Hit Somebody", a sports flick about hockey, or "Red State", which he describes as a very dark psychological horror film.
I think that while Smith has been making the same type of films for some time, he seems to have come to the same conclusion, and now he is trying something else.
I think Luthor suspects the kid, but it has been a while since I seen Returns.
Singer said publicly that he was making his film as a direct sequel to Superman 1 and 2, but not really considering 3 and 4. Those movies are fairly old, and if you didn't see them, I guess it wouldn't be pretty clear where the kid came from, or why Lois didn't know.
Superman 2 is a great film, and held up (even today, though it is a little slow by modern standards) by some as the best superhero film of all time. I'll take Dark Knight, but Superman 2 is worth watching at least once. I assume most geeks have seen it.
They've hired some strong vets down in Austin who have worked on MMOs for years and years, including the first major MMO in Ultima Online.
Bioware is behind this. They're promising to bring their style of single-player story arcs to the MMO genre. They said they were not going to do an MMO until they were convinced they could do it right. Like Blizzard, they are a studio that holds themselves to a pretty high standard.
The "trailers" are nothing short of amazing.
They're focusing on an era that many fans love, and haves tons of Sith and Jedi, where as Galaxies mishandled Jedi.
Galaxies was pretty bad to begin with, but had some fans. They they completely changed the game to try and appease people who didn't like it, and in the process alienated the few who did like it.
You're a bit mistaken.
Lois is genuinely shocked that her son displays super powers. The real key is understanding this is a direct sequel to Superman 2. In that film, Superman becomes a normal mortal, sleeps with Lois, but then wipes her memory at the end.
Lois has no memory of sleeping with Supes. Why would she assume it is his kid? She is a single gal with no memory of a romance with Supes, hooks up with a guy, gets pregnant, and has no reason to assume the kid is someone else's.
The fucked up part is that Supes screwed Lois and then wiped her memory in part 2. Shouldn't there be a scene in Returns where she goes to the hospital and says "I have no memory of us having sex? Did you rape me?"
Where did you read that?
Star Wars: The Old Republic will crush this game. SW:ToR won't be out until October, but it will be the final nail in the coffin for this game.
He didn't leave after the kid. He comes back and is shocked to discover that Lois has a kid and fiance. For all anyone knows, that kid isn't Supes. Until the end, what reason does Supes have to assume the kid is his.
Not to mention, Supes never lifts anything with TK once that I've seen. And if his powers were purely mental and simply believing in them, then he wouldn't be powered by the sun.
Even if the Kryptonite wasn't toxic, lifting a continent goes a bit far.
I misspelled Lois. Fair enough.
But Supes slept with Lois in 2, and fathered a kid. That somehow makes him gay?
Why does everyone say Supes was gay in the latest film, just because the director was gay?
You may not realize this, but there are other gay directors in Hollywood. Is every character in all of their films gay?
I'm one of the few that rather liked the last Superman film. The major problem was a lack of action, and a ridiculous plot hole at the end (landing on the kryptonite land mass nearly killed him, but later he can lift a giant kryptonite continent with no problems).
I think Singer absolutely loves Superman, and did the character justice. He is a giant boy scout who feels ultimately alone. Superman's weaknesses extend past Kryptonite. Superman's powers can't help with Louis leaving him. But in having a kid, he suddenly doesn't feel as alone.
The Donner Superman films dealt with Marlon Brando saying goodbye to his son, who he sends to Earth. I thought Singer's Superman did a good job of integrating Brando's father/son arc.
People forget but Singer's first X-Men film didn't have good action. The second was CONSIDERABLY better. I would have liked to see Singer get a second shot at Superman.
Kevin Smith's problem isn't failure. All of his films turn a profit, and then sell like mad on DVD. He doesn't make 200 million in the box office, but he almost always shoots with a very low budget.
There is something to be said for a director who always turns a profit. Kevin Smith will never make a billion dollar picture like The Dark Knight, be he also won't lose you 200 million on a failed tent-pole.
Warner Brothers flat out said the next Superman needed to be dark and mimic The Dark Knight. Apparently they can't grasp that Superman and Batman are different characters.
Robert Pattison (or whatever that Twilight actor's name) is likely the next, emo, brooding, dark Peter Parker.