And as a bonus, from a Mozilla-technology using developer (I don't think he's affiliated with Mozilla in any official capacity anymore) Daniel Glazman: Google Chrome Frame.
I've already seen a ton of posts thinking that this browser is somehow distinct from Firefox. It isn't. Minefield is the application name for any version of Firefox currently under development (just like Shredder is for Thunderbird). These names have been specifically chosen to sound scary, as these builds have gotten virtually no testing, and using them is not recommended for the general public. They are not in any way considered stable, and might (as the old joke goes) set your computer on fire or eat babies. It was a really bad idea of the submitter to promote using just any old nightly build - at least without explaining what nightly builds are. (They're basically automated builds created daily; testing them is highly welcome (which is why they're made available), but expect to find bugs (and please report those bugs!) - they are most definitely not vetted for general use.)
If you do want to experience the recent developments and see what Firefox 3.1 will be like when it's released, Beta 1 was recently released, and has at least gotten a nominal amount of testing to ensure that the risk of fires and devoured babies is small.
Man, they SERIOUSLY need that license notification...considering that last I checked, Firefox wasn't GPL (its MPL) and a lot of people here seem to think it is!
It's both. And also LGPL.
Mozilla source code is (and has been for several years now) completely tri-licensed. You can choose whether to use it under the terms of the GPL, the LGPL or the MPL, or any combination thereof.
I really don't understand why people keep linking to silly "news" sites when there's pretty much always far more comprehensive and accurate information available directly at the source.
For the results below we loaded 29 different web pages through 30 windows over 11 cycles (319 total page loads), always opening a new window for each page load (closing the oldest window alive once we hit 30 windows). At the end we close all the windows but one and let the browser sit for a few minutes so see if they will reclaim memory, clear short-term caches, etc.
So that is all the memory being reclaimed upon closing all but one of the windows, and then doing nothing whatsoever.
Polishing the current Thunderbird is (at least from the impression I get) actually one of the main goals for Thunderbird 3. It's not all that exciting to talk about, so it only got the "a set of other user interface improvements" line in davida's article, but it's definitely known that making the program just a little bit better in many small ways (my personal pet peeve on this plane is not being able to search across all accounts) would make it hugely more useful for many people, and just good enough for a whole bunch of new potential users.
And no, spinning Mozilla Messaging off actually means it has the chance to finally get the attention it deserves. The Mozilla Corporation has been totally focussed on Firefox (since that's their big cashcow, and it's hard to do two things well), and the Mozilla Foundation is mostly just an oversight and broad planning organization, so a separate organization was needed to let email stand on its own. The Mozilla Foundation hopes that Mozilla Messaging will find its own source of income fairly soon, but they're heavily investing in it right now, and I suspect that if Mozilla Messaging is successful in furthering the goals from the Mozilla Manifesto, but without attracting a lot of income of its own, that funding will just keep on coming (bankrolled by the money Firefox earns). That's pure speculation on my part, and obviously MoFo won't say anything like that, because that would remove much of the incentive for Mozilla Messaging to find its own sources of funding - but it'd make sense.
David Ascher really gives me hope for where things are going - but he can't do it alone. And he can't get the people who'd help to do so if he's being ignored!
I'm subscribed to a reasonable active mailing list for the type of music I like (characterized by words like: female, singer-songwriter, alternative, ethereal, celtic, eclectic, folk, americana - although obviously not all at the same time; think artists in the range of Björk, Sarah McLachlan, Loreena McKennit, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins - although that pretty much exhausts the list of big names, and 95% of our conversation is about independent artists who (imo) sound far better than most of those, but whose names you'll never have heard of), where people constantly toss out new interesting names they've just discovered, and write about shows they attended. (The name of the mailinglist is ecto.)
CD Baby with its decent 2-minute samples and rather good "sounds like" comparisons is another way I've used to discover new music. All artists listed here are independent.
Opening acts at concerts of artists I already like also frequently turn out to be worthwhile in their own right. That's not a very swift way to get to know new artists, but it does add up over time.
Finally, every other year or so I get together (in the real world) with a group of people from the mailinglist, and we all bring the worthwhile CDs we've bought since the last such meet, which we play for each other throughout the day. We also make sampler CDs for each other, so we can all go back and re-listen to those things which caught our interest and remember "oh yeah, that sounded really good, I need to go and buy that".
The Mozilla Corporation also makes some money by developing "official" Firefox add-ons (titled "Companion"), such as the Firefox Companion for eBay, and the Joga Companion back during the football worldcup.
Mitchell (Mozilla's "chief lizard wrangler") wrote a fairly large blog post, not only about the numbers as published, but also saying some things on the directions Mozilla is moving.
Far more interesting reading than the fluff news.com article, let alone the random FUD spouting by the submitter.
Mozilla 2 == Gecko 2. Mozilla is the catchall name for the platform, with a version number equal to that of the rendering engine.
Individual products (such as Firefox, SeaMonkey, Camino, Thunderbird, etc, etc, etc) all have their own versioning scheme, as decided upon by their respective marketing people. This is the only number end-users should care about (for their own favorite product), but developers can always refer back to the gecko/mozilla version to know how these products relate to each other.
There's a whole lot of science fiction authors who no longer are writing about the (far) future. Ken MacLeod, Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, Vernor Vinge... they've all shifted focus to what's happening in the here and now. The one explanation on this I've seen was in an interview with William Gibson, where he said that the current day had gotten stranger and harder to follow than anything he could imagine or predict for the future.
Vinge's older books might have had a wider scope - been more interesting (something I've seen a whole lot of old-day Vinge fans here at/. say) - but Rainbows End is far more relevant. The underlying world contains much less self-congratulatory "humanity is so great, destined for so much" escapism and much more "look at what we're allowing to happen here, people".
Fantasy most certainly does belong in the Hugos. From the FAQ:
Aren't Hugos just for Science Fiction?
While the organization sponsoring the Hugos is named the World Science Fiction Society, our charter explicitly makes fantasy as well as SF eligible for our awards. Works of fantasy have often won Hugos, and, in fact, Hugos have been won by works that some people consider horror or even mainstream. There will never be universal agreement about the precise distinctions between genres and sub-genres, so WSFS's position is that eligibility is determined by the voters. To paraphrase the great SF editor and writer Damon Knight, a Hugo winner is what the Hugo voters point to when they award a Hugo.
Also, you must never have read C.S. Friedman's The Madness Season, or Steven Brust's Agyar. Just like not all science fiction is rocket-ships and laser-guns, not all vampires come from "hell or another dimension".
No. The 2007 Hugo is for a book published in 2006. (Although there's some leeway for which date to pick for books which were first published outside the USA.)
I read Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End last year, and wrote the following about it:
I expected it to be good, but it's gone way far above and beyond any expectations I harboured. Everything it did, it did perfectly right. The people living this story have become gloriously real, the story captivated me more and more with each passing chapter (building up to an awesome conclusion), there were real emotions, chillingly shocking and yet hopeful visions of the future as it could be, and through it all, the sense that everything in this book was written by someone who really knows what he's talking about.
The technology predictions in this book won't stand the test of time. Two years from now they'll still be valid, but five years from now they'll already be decidedly quaint. Still, as someone very famous once said, science fiction isn't about the future, it's about the present. And I think there's very few people who understand the present as well as Vinge does. And I can pretty much guarantee that even when the technology predictions are considered not just quaint but hilariously outdated, this book will still be read and enjoyed - simply because it's an awesome book with an awesome story.
You're looking at the clear winner of next year's Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Ok, so I was wrong about the Nebula. Can't win them all.:)
I can also highly recommend this book to everyone here at slashdot. It's the kind of book most of us will be able to relate to. A book by a geek who understands not only technology, but also the social implications thereof.
Don't "ask them". Do it yourself (strike out the offending lines, maybe write in a new clause: initial those changes, and have them initial them as well). By offering you a contract, they have all the power. Treat their proposed text as a starting point, and give yourself back some of that power. You already know they want to hire you: this puts you on equal footing. Use that knowledge. It's in both your interests to come to a agreement that you're both happy with, and a contract is a great tool for that purpose.
Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 were on the Mozilla 1.8 branch, which split from trunk in mid August 2005. That means there's been 16 months of changes to trunk which haven't had any release testing them. It's good for these to be tested separately by a larger group of people than those who test nightlies, before a very large batch of new and dangerous changes is added to the mix. (And then those changes will go on to be tested by nightly testers to get rid off all the 'obvious' regressions before pushing it to a larger audience to find the hard things that only can be found by that many eyeballs.
Before someone else brings it up, no, this doesn't pass acid2. Purposefully, as the build from two days later does. This Gecko alpha (not Firefox alpha) was released so there'd be a good reference for people to test with before several rather major changes were landed on trunk, one of which was the reflow branch that made Gecko pass the acid2 test.
To be hones here, I have not the slightest idea what this sentence is supposed to mean. What on earth is a "tri-license"? Are these three identical? If they are, why are all three needed? If they aren't which one applies in a case where they disagree? Who gets to decide?
You do. The code is licensed under all three licenses, and you can pick one or more of the licenses you want to follow at your own digression. (Very roughly, and IANAL, so don't take this as legal advice: MPL: upon publication you only have to show your modifications to the source of the MPL-ed files. Completely new files can be kept closed. LGPL: upon publication you only have to show your modifications and additions to the source of the part of the program that functions as a separate library; you can link other things against this and keep this closed. GPL: upon publication you have to show all your modifications and additions.) This is so projects which are GPL-only or LGPL-only can just incorporate Mozilla code without any worries (and the MPL is an evolution from the N(etscape)PL, which is basically good for keeping some proprietary stuff proprietary, and thus very favoured by businesses).
The only constraint is that if you want your modifications accepted back into the main Mozilla tree, they need to be licensed under all three licenses as well.
Mozilla was under GPL/MPL (dual licensed). I believe that SeaMonkey is also. FireFox has a different license. The license terms are "near GPL", but aren't the same at all.
This is close, but not quite true. All Mozilla, SeaMonkey and Firefox code is tri-licensed (MPL/GPL/LGPL), no exceptions. (Actually it used to be that a small percentage of code wasn't under the GPL yet, and Mozilla spent a couple of years tracking down the owners and acquiring permission to really make it all GPL-ed.)
And then there's the Firefox binary, which is licensed with the Mozilla EULA.
But yeah, as you said, the issue at hand here is purely about trademarks, which (sadly?) need to be strongly protected for legal reasons.
No way to disable the menu, without going in and re-writing the XUL code. IE? Easy, shove a.reg file to the machine to disable access to that tab. Easy to bypass, yes. For a geek. But for a general user, not quite so easy for them.
If the.reg file is an adequate solution for IE, then a userChrome.css file that simply sets the relevant preference panel to display: none, and a user.js file to reset the proxy settings at each startup (in case the user knows how to find about:config) should be equally adequate.
Just went to look it up. They of course didn't bother to tag the groupbox with an id ("grandmothers don't need easily modifiable chrome!" - meh, give me SeaMonkey any day of the week), but you can hide the "connection settings" button with the following rule: #catProxiesButton { display: none !important; }
It would even be easy to skew the results simply by dumping a load of pictures up on the site from a certain brand and make it appear that it is more popular than it is.
Flickr gets over a million new pictures uploaded on a good day. I really don't think skewing the results is that easy (assuming the 'periodical' sampling is not predictable).
I also think that people who spend a fortune on a digital camera are the pros buying a D2Xs or a 1D Mark II, and those are much less likely to upload pictures. Low-end DSLRs definitely count as "casual" in my book.
For people without the hard drive space to dual boot, is Konqueror or any other KHTML based web browser ported to Microsoft Windows yet?
Yes, Swift ("a web browser for Windows based on the Apple WebKit rendering engine") would fit that bill, although from what I've heard, Webkit has diverged quite a bit from KHTML. (Also: very alpha!)
I imagine you could easily make a firefox plugin that would destroy all cookies from either a whitelist or blacklist of domains every time you start/shutdown the browser.
There's absolutely no reason to use a plugin for that, Firefox can do this just by itself (as can SeaMonkey, and even Mozilla could do it already). You can either create a blacklist of domains that are only allowed to set session cookies (tools -> options -> privacy -> cookies -> exceptions -> "allow for session" (which downgrades all cookies to being valid for the session only), or a whitelist of domains that are allowed to set cookies ("allow"), while everything else will honor "keep cookies: until I close Firefox".)
(So to put it in other word, Exceptions override any other settings, so you can use it as both whitelist and blacklist, while general settings govern all other sites.)
Slashdot Mirror
Urgh, I hate these links to useless tech news websites, rather than the original sources. To see what the Mozilla executives in question actually had to say, with their words in context, read Mitchell Baker: Browser Soup and Chrome Frame and Mike Shaver: thoughts on chrome frame.
And as a bonus, from a Mozilla-technology using developer (I don't think he's affiliated with Mozilla in any official capacity anymore) Daniel Glazman: Google Chrome Frame.
I've already seen a ton of posts thinking that this browser is somehow distinct from Firefox. It isn't. Minefield is the application name for any version of Firefox currently under development (just like Shredder is for Thunderbird). These names have been specifically chosen to sound scary, as these builds have gotten virtually no testing, and using them is not recommended for the general public. They are not in any way considered stable, and might (as the old joke goes) set your computer on fire or eat babies. It was a really bad idea of the submitter to promote using just any old nightly build - at least without explaining what nightly builds are. (They're basically automated builds created daily; testing them is highly welcome (which is why they're made available), but expect to find bugs (and please report those bugs!) - they are most definitely not vetted for general use.)
If you do want to experience the recent developments and see what Firefox 3.1 will be like when it's released, Beta 1 was recently released, and has at least gotten a nominal amount of testing to ensure that the risk of fires and devoured babies is small.
It's both. And also LGPL.
Mozilla source code is (and has been for several years now) completely tri-licensed. You can choose whether to use it under the terms of the GPL, the LGPL or the MPL, or any combination thereof.
Read Mitchell's own words.
I really don't understand why people keep linking to silly "news" sites when there's pretty much always far more comprehensive and accurate information available directly at the source.
From the original blog post:
So that is all the memory being reclaimed upon closing all but one of the windows, and then doing nothing whatsoever.
Polishing the current Thunderbird is (at least from the impression I get) actually one of the main goals for Thunderbird 3. It's not all that exciting to talk about, so it only got the "a set of other user interface improvements" line in davida's article, but it's definitely known that making the program just a little bit better in many small ways (my personal pet peeve on this plane is not being able to search across all accounts) would make it hugely more useful for many people, and just good enough for a whole bunch of new potential users.
And no, spinning Mozilla Messaging off actually means it has the chance to finally get the attention it deserves. The Mozilla Corporation has been totally focussed on Firefox (since that's their big cashcow, and it's hard to do two things well), and the Mozilla Foundation is mostly just an oversight and broad planning organization, so a separate organization was needed to let email stand on its own. The Mozilla Foundation hopes that Mozilla Messaging will find its own source of income fairly soon, but they're heavily investing in it right now, and I suspect that if Mozilla Messaging is successful in furthering the goals from the Mozilla Manifesto, but without attracting a lot of income of its own, that funding will just keep on coming (bankrolled by the money Firefox earns). That's pure speculation on my part, and obviously MoFo won't say anything like that, because that would remove much of the incentive for Mozilla Messaging to find its own sources of funding - but it'd make sense.
The CEO of this new Mozilla Messaging company writes the most insightful blog post containing the most hopeful look at the future of messaging and how Thunderbird could make a difference there... and slashdot links to mostly useless informationweek and zdnet stories?? Bleh...
David Ascher really gives me hope for where things are going - but he can't do it alone. And he can't get the people who'd help to do so if he's being ignored!
I'm subscribed to a reasonable active mailing list for the type of music I like (characterized by words like: female, singer-songwriter, alternative, ethereal, celtic, eclectic, folk, americana - although obviously not all at the same time; think artists in the range of Björk, Sarah McLachlan, Loreena McKennit, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins - although that pretty much exhausts the list of big names, and 95% of our conversation is about independent artists who (imo) sound far better than most of those, but whose names you'll never have heard of), where people constantly toss out new interesting names they've just discovered, and write about shows they attended. (The name of the mailinglist is ecto.)
CD Baby with its decent 2-minute samples and rather good "sounds like" comparisons is another way I've used to discover new music. All artists listed here are independent.
Opening acts at concerts of artists I already like also frequently turn out to be worthwhile in their own right. That's not a very swift way to get to know new artists, but it does add up over time.
Finally, every other year or so I get together (in the real world) with a group of people from the mailinglist, and we all bring the worthwhile CDs we've bought since the last such meet, which we play for each other throughout the day. We also make sampler CDs for each other, so we can all go back and re-listen to those things which caught our interest and remember "oh yeah, that sounded really good, I need to go and buy that".
The Mozilla Corporation also makes some money by developing "official" Firefox add-ons (titled "Companion"), such as the Firefox Companion for eBay, and the Joga Companion back during the football worldcup.
Mitchell (Mozilla's "chief lizard wrangler") wrote a fairly large blog post, not only about the numbers as published, but also saying some things on the directions Mozilla is moving.
Far more interesting reading than the fluff news.com article, let alone the random FUD spouting by the submitter.
Mozilla 2 == Gecko 2. Mozilla is the catchall name for the platform, with a version number equal to that of the rendering engine.
Individual products (such as Firefox, SeaMonkey, Camino, Thunderbird, etc, etc, etc) all have their own versioning scheme, as decided upon by their respective marketing people. This is the only number end-users should care about (for their own favorite product), but developers can always refer back to the gecko/mozilla version to know how these products relate to each other.
There's a whole lot of science fiction authors who no longer are writing about the (far) future. Ken MacLeod, Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, Vernor Vinge... they've all shifted focus to what's happening in the here and now. The one explanation on this I've seen was in an interview with William Gibson, where he said that the current day had gotten stranger and harder to follow than anything he could imagine or predict for the future.
Vinge's older books might have had a wider scope - been more interesting (something I've seen a whole lot of old-day Vinge fans here at /. say) - but Rainbows End is far more relevant. The underlying world contains much less self-congratulatory "humanity is so great, destined for so much" escapism and much more "look at what we're allowing to happen here, people".
Fantasy most certainly does belong in the Hugos. From the FAQ:
Also, you must never have read C.S. Friedman's The Madness Season, or Steven Brust's Agyar. Just like not all science fiction is rocket-ships and laser-guns, not all vampires come from "hell or another dimension".
No. The 2007 Hugo is for a book published in 2006. (Although there's some leeway for which date to pick for books which were first published outside the USA.)
I read Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End last year, and wrote the following about it:
Ok, so I was wrong about the Nebula. Can't win them all. :)
I can also highly recommend this book to everyone here at slashdot. It's the kind of book most of us will be able to relate to. A book by a geek who understands not only technology, but also the social implications thereof.
Don't "ask them". Do it yourself (strike out the offending lines, maybe write in a new clause: initial those changes, and have them initial them as well). By offering you a contract, they have all the power. Treat their proposed text as a starting point, and give yourself back some of that power. You already know they want to hire you: this puts you on equal footing. Use that knowledge. It's in both your interests to come to a agreement that you're both happy with, and a contract is a great tool for that purpose.
Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 were on the Mozilla 1.8 branch, which split from trunk in mid August 2005. That means there's been 16 months of changes to trunk which haven't had any release testing them. It's good for these to be tested separately by a larger group of people than those who test nightlies, before a very large batch of new and dangerous changes is added to the mix. (And then those changes will go on to be tested by nightly testers to get rid off all the 'obvious' regressions before pushing it to a larger audience to find the hard things that only can be found by that many eyeballs.
Before someone else brings it up, no, this doesn't pass acid2. Purposefully, as the build from two days later does. This Gecko alpha (not Firefox alpha) was released so there'd be a good reference for people to test with before several rather major changes were landed on trunk, one of which was the reflow branch that made Gecko pass the acid2 test.
You do. The code is licensed under all three licenses, and you can pick one or more of the licenses you want to follow at your own digression. (Very roughly, and IANAL, so don't take this as legal advice: MPL: upon publication you only have to show your modifications to the source of the MPL-ed files. Completely new files can be kept closed. LGPL: upon publication you only have to show your modifications and additions to the source of the part of the program that functions as a separate library; you can link other things against this and keep this closed. GPL: upon publication you have to show all your modifications and additions.) This is so projects which are GPL-only or LGPL-only can just incorporate Mozilla code without any worries (and the MPL is an evolution from the N(etscape)PL, which is basically good for keeping some proprietary stuff proprietary, and thus very favoured by businesses).
The only constraint is that if you want your modifications accepted back into the main Mozilla tree, they need to be licensed under all three licenses as well.
For more, see the Mozilla pages on this.
This is close, but not quite true. All Mozilla, SeaMonkey and Firefox code is tri-licensed (MPL/GPL/LGPL), no exceptions. (Actually it used to be that a small percentage of code wasn't under the GPL yet, and Mozilla spent a couple of years tracking down the owners and acquiring permission to really make it all GPL-ed.)
And then there's the Firefox binary, which is licensed with the Mozilla EULA.
But yeah, as you said, the issue at hand here is purely about trademarks, which (sadly?) need to be strongly protected for legal reasons.
If the .reg file is an adequate solution for IE, then a userChrome.css file that simply sets the relevant preference panel to display: none, and a user.js file to reset the proxy settings at each startup (in case the user knows how to find about:config) should be equally adequate.
Just went to look it up. They of course didn't bother to tag the groupbox with an id ("grandmothers don't need easily modifiable chrome!" - meh, give me SeaMonkey any day of the week), but you can hide the "connection settings" button with the following rule: #catProxiesButton { display: none !important; }
Flickr gets over a million new pictures uploaded on a good day. I really don't think skewing the results is that easy (assuming the 'periodical' sampling is not predictable).
I also think that people who spend a fortune on a digital camera are the pros buying a D2Xs or a 1D Mark II, and those are much less likely to upload pictures. Low-end DSLRs definitely count as "casual" in my book.
Almost, but not quite. 350D and Digital Rebel XT (so positions 1 and 3) are the same.
Digital Rebel is the 300D, while Digital Rebel XTi is the 400D.
Also, here's the original (much more extensive) source, which is way more useful than just some stupid blog linking to it. Also good to see is this (month old) graph of the relative movement over time.
Yes, Swift ("a web browser for Windows based on the Apple WebKit rendering engine") would fit that bill, although from what I've heard, Webkit has diverged quite a bit from KHTML. (Also: very alpha!)
There's absolutely no reason to use a plugin for that, Firefox can do this just by itself (as can SeaMonkey, and even Mozilla could do it already). You can either create a blacklist of domains that are only allowed to set session cookies (tools -> options -> privacy -> cookies -> exceptions -> "allow for session" (which downgrades all cookies to being valid for the session only), or a whitelist of domains that are allowed to set cookies ("allow"), while everything else will honor "keep cookies: until I close Firefox".)
(So to put it in other word, Exceptions override any other settings, so you can use it as both whitelist and blacklist, while general settings govern all other sites.)