Logging in for the first time in at least 3 years for the sole purpose of contributing to the "fuck beta" momentum building up here.
I've seen one particulary inspiring comment (can't remember whose quote it is off-hand, sorry) - as a last resort, if the beta movement isn't rescinded then let's do what we always do when an OSS project goes to hell.
Fork it.
Get the fuck away from DICE and get our own/. going. If they're so determined to drive the majority of us away from this site, may as well have a new place to call home.
It took me a moment to remember this, but now I remember it much more clearly. MPlayer offered listings of online matches to join with lobbies (chat rooms) that had voice (microphone) support, and they supported many games. I used to play Red Alert frequently via MPlayer since Westwood Online was so lousy and WO didn't have such a concept as a lobby where you can find players who are looking for games. The old MPlayer reminds me of what Xbox Live allows me to do today in some ways. After Gamespot bought out MPlayer it was pretty much all over. I haven't had a decent 3v3 match on the hjk6 map in so many years, now I miss it. Of all the C&C games I've seen, Red Alert was the best and MPlayer really made the multiplayer shine.
Thanks for posting that transcript, CronoCloud, I actually read the entire thing.
I'm really getting an image of their perspective. Unfortunately, CronoCloud, you actually could have argued it better. You stood only on the "feeling" defensive saying that you felt it was better but they keep insisting for a rationalized justification. I would have turned that philosophy around on them. (Note that I too want the protocl icons back.) First of all, if they want to minimize how much code they're maintaining by removing things that they believe serve no purpose, then they perhaps should discard the entire GUI altogether, as it serves no purpose since they have a perfectly functional command-line IM client. But they might argue not having a GUI makes it more confusing and less usable, no, by their philosophy that's just a feeling and it is not enough to matter. In my opinion the command-line is easier to use so why bother maintaining all of that nasty GTK+ code? Throw it away! Screw the touchy-feely users who can't justify their opinions! Hopefully this example gives you the idea I'm trying to establish.
Now let me try to defend the protocol icons. Granted yes I would much rather have them than not, but that's just a feeling so we need something concrete, some facts. I'll list some examples for why you would want it back.
Contacts with multiple protocol accounts: I have a friend who usually leaves his home computer connected on protocols like MSN and AIM but he is only on Jabber on his home machine or laptop when he's actually at the machine. Obviously my preference is Jabber so if I don't see the Jabber icon and my Jabber connection hasn't failed, I already know he's probably not home. All I have to do is look at the buddy list and I'll know. Don't need to bother him with IMs and no need to examine the list every single time.
Different protocols use different emoticons: This seems kind of minor but there's a point. If you already know what the protocol is, you will know which emoticon set is available. Look at Yahoo and MSN and how vast and different the default set of emoticons is. I shouldn't have to take extra steps to ascertain over which protocol I'm sending the message!
Protocol-specific functions: I don't know about anyone else, but I've never gotten file transfer to work properly unless it was over AIM. Taking extra steps to verify I'm IMing via AIM and not another protocol seems unnecessarily redundant especially if I had the protocol icons like before!
I'm not sure but there may be more legitimate reasons to bring those icons back. CronoCloud, I wish such thinking had occurred to you at the time so you could present this rationale the devs keep asking for. I somewhat suspect they truly don't care about providing to anyone but themselves and they have a point, in which case I wonder why they bothered releasing it to the public to begin with and work with users if they didn't care. They're a complicated bunch. I don't see why they're so picky about having options or even throwing things into a plugin. Having more abilities depending on how you are using the program makes it more powerful. (Example: Reinstating the Send button helps tablet computer users!)
I hope the fork is actually maintained and supported. If the fork maintainers are truly serious, they could effectively cause pidgin to become deprecated except for all the back-end work. So the ideal combination is funpidin for the GUI and pidgin for the back-end (libpurple and protocol support).
Maybe someday we'll see webcams supported so I can kick Kopete off the system?:)
This has been well overdue in my honest opinion! From every minor release to release we have been seeing subtle UI changes that offer absolutely no choice. The preferences dialog hardly ever changes while other things are changing on me and I'm stuck with the changes.
How about the release where they changed the formatting button bar into two drop-down menus? I'm glad that you can actually revert it back to a useful formatting bar by right-clicking it and selecting the alternative. But the icon changes, the dropping of the emoticons from Gaim 1.5.x, and more things I just don't care to remember right now, I'm tired of it. This is precisely why I left GNOME for XFCE; I still wanted a GTK+ interface but I didn't want to see any more features stripped away from me and stupid UI/dialog box changes because "the last version is too hard for users." (Granted that excuse is not coming from the Pidgin devs.)
I believe my superior grievance lies with Pidgin devs' claim to investigate what gaim-vv attempted: adding support for webcams and/or microphones for the protocols that support it. They posted that this development would be considered after a stable 2.0 release. Well they've had Pidgin 2.0 release a long while back now, and do I see even a hint about what they said? Nope.
Seriously what are they thinking? I can only imagine that, if in their position, obviously Pidgin is (apparently) the most popular GTK+ based IM client. If it were up to me, I would work on expanding the client to support the other functionalities of the supported protocols that are still not implemented, such as the aforementioned audiovisual support and file-transfer support that actually works on protocols other than AIM's.
Not posting as AC because if this is worthy of bad karma than I deserve it. This had to be said. I welcome a fork that works on making progress instead of focusing on satisfying egotistical interface desires of the developers.
I've noticed several suggestions to just encrypt the filesystem with TrueCrypt or use passwords (BIOS, boot loader e.g. GRUB, OS username/password) and that if you refuse to decrypt for them by entering the password, they confiscate the device. Although it seems like the solution is, also aforementioned, to boot into a "dummy" OS with nothing special in it to conceal the fact that another OS with accessible data exists somewhere else on the drive. It would be as easy as using "e" to edit the commands in GRUB to change the root= option to boot the "real" root filesystem.
The object of this post is to consider a foreign government official that obviously has a reason for having something like TrueCrypt on there. What is the consequence in this case? Would such a person, with identification, be allowed to pass without a laptop search? How can security tell what a real foreign ID looks like when a person tries to identify himself as being part of a foreign government? Could I just, for example, fake a French federal agent ID and claim they must not force me to enter the password?
Might be an interesting scenario, I wonder what they'd do...
I can only hope this sort of thing promotes the appeal of using OpenGL, so more games are more likely to become cross-compatible. Projects like WineHQ can mimic the behavior of Win32 API, and things would run more smoothly if instead of translating DX, to just have OpenGL games to begin with. Does DX really provide or perform more/better than OpenGL that commercial games continue to use DX??
I hate garbage like this. I swear it's like the people who decide to do stuff like this are fascists and do it on purpose because they can. I mean when XP came out it was so stupid that you had to "hack" it to uninstall MSN messenger! Now this?! My list of reasons to keep using Linux keeps on growing and growing...
With my distro, you won't even get a boot loader if you don't install it! Even years ago on RedHat there was a screen asking how you want to install a boot loader, if at all, offering LILO or GRUB. I never heard of a distro just forcing GRUB down your throat.....
I wonder how well StarFox would run on it. That game really could use a better frame rate. Or I could just grab my N64... I'm sure there are some games, perhaps StarOcean for example, that would run better with an OC'ed SNES?
A new thing for me. Anyway, how many people honestly care what this guy does? I'm sick of hearing his name for pointless reasons. Why is this considered news anyway?
Okay, why does it say that Linux is not good enough of an excuse to get a "naked" PC???
I don't need an excuse. If I was going to buy a computer, I want to buy the hardware, and not be forced to shell out money for software they want to give me if I don't want it. I can't believe they think that OS-less computers are all potential machines to have pirated Windows on it. Honestly the point of getting no OS is just that, to have nothing there; why waste the money on the OS if you're going to erase it anyway? Also, maybe I would buy a computer without an OS because I don't want Windows, period. This has antitrust written all over it, may they burn and die a painful death for all I care. And all I wanted was a laptop with an nVidia card, an AMD CPU, and no OS. I can't find any one laptop with even two of those criteria! (Not blaming MS for this though.)
Any weaknesses it can find in commercially available Web filters will be crucial to the Justice Department's defense of the Child Online Protection Act.
You know, I look at that and wonder.. reminds me of MS, they can't solve a problem themselves so beat it out of someone else who might have the solution. Except this is the government, I'm afraid to see how far they'll go to do what they want... I'm not just being paranoid am I?
Not exactly. How many times has MS done something they shouldn't be able to get away with? Now they ought to be shielded from any mischief coming their way? Ok, they should be burned because of what they did in the past, that isn't right, I agree. But... it shouldn't be how it is, it isn't balanced (in terms of justice). Either they take the headaches they've earned now or they pay the price for their crap in the past. I just think it's bullshit for them to continue their harassment left and right and get protected when they slip into something themselves.
Thanks goes to the other poster for clearing up the whole EU/US mix-up.
Why the hell does the government care how they're treated? I think it's ridiculous, the US says "Please be nice to Bill." What the hell? All the bullshit they pull, like getting patents awarded for stuff a lot of us know they never created themselves, all the stunts they pull to weasel their way into wherever they want more control just to have it, to try to screw over whatever alternatives in the field (you name it, from browsers to consoles.) I say screw them, let the EU be as unfair to them as they want, as if they've been fair with anybody else. About time someone pushed MS around and made them cry for fairness instead of the other way around. Besides, the EU does what it feels it should, (right?) I don't think they'll do things differently because MS requests it.
I recently had to write a program for a network programming class that accepts a URL, determines its host and request and sends out an HTTP request, then takes the resulting HTML and parses it for all URLs within it, and finally ping all the URLs it finds in that HTML page. Now, my program is only as verbose as it had to be but out of curiosity, I wanted to use it to try two URLs I saw in the replies for this post. Seeing how everyone says the command-line browsers all fail, I just had to try it, so here's my first try, and I get results as expected:
$ java LinkParser www.photosparks.com
Running...
Connecting to host: www.photosparks.com
Sending server the request:
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Java
Host: www.photosparks.com
Connection: close
Pinging www.photosparks.com (gallery)
Requesting/gallery/index.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging www.photosparks.com (weddings)
Requesting/weddings.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging www.photosparks.com (contact)
Requesting/contact.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging www.photosparks.com (home)
Requesting/index.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging www.photosparks.com (portraits)
Requesting/portraitpricing.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging sparks.photoreflect.com (click here)
Requesting /
Returned status 302 Redirect
Pinging www.photoreflect.com (click here)
Requesting /
Returned status 302 Redirect
Okay so now I try another one:
$ java LinkParser www.catalogueofships.com
Running...
Connecting to host: www.catalogueofships.com
Sending server the request:
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Java
Host: www.catalogueofships.com
Connection: close
And the output stops there, the program just terminates. I have seen this behavior just once before, the sample testing page the professor offered us. It was hosted on the school server which behaved the same way. (I'm not saying it has the same problem as described with godaddy domain, but the result was the same, the program would just seemingly die.) For our scenario, the server was configured to reject all requests that lacked a User-Agent field in the header; it wouldn't even give a connection refused response.
I'm sure if I make my program more verbose I will discover what others have already found about the problem described.
I thought it would be interesting to post these results, and also, what is the purpose to configure a server to reject requests without a User-Agent? If the answer is to stop abusive network traffic, what is the point, anyone can very easily specify any User-Agent value as I have: I simply put "Java" there, as if the server knows any better!
Okay when I saw the/. entry, I knew I had to say what I got here. The announcement of a security flaw in Firefox is the cause of the decelerating growth? This is insane; immediately I think that everyone assumed that Firefox is totally safe. Gah! It's not a silver bullet! It's good but it can't be perfect. Nothing is! Oh, so Firefox has one problem which will be fixed pretty quickly like most of the OSS world, but people will go and hide behind IE again since they think that the reports are false.
Ugh, how long does it take for IE patches to come out, if ever??? Only if there's a widely-spreading virus or trojan exploiting it, then you get a patch miraculously within a day or two. Otherwise they just wipe your complaining away like a speck of dust. On top of that I bet IE has a lot more problems to worry about than Firefox could ever have. I know it's possible for IE to wipe out files on the hard disk; I doubt Firefox could do it unless there is some sort of ported ActiveX support forcefully ported to Firefox.
Since I mentioned MS wiping you off like dust, I say that because way back when I submitted a report about the Up button not working when IE was in FTP mode. The Up button was calling the same routine that Back did. I tested it by going down a few directories and dumping the entire history cache. Up did not work as Back did not. I knew that was proof that Up didn't work right because you don't need a history to `cd..'!! Every e-mail I got back from their "support" was garbage; all about searching their "Knowledge Base" (which lacked any knowledge about this by the way) and some FAQ URLs. Screw 'em. Let IE burn, it's garbage ever since it's been forced down Windows's throat.
By the way, I remember the IE4 alpha PNG on the feature list. I was shocked to see it again for IE7. Took long enough! but wait we don't know if they'll actually do it this time.
"...will provide Microsoft with... the contents of documents being created."
The words I cut out don't alter the meaning I have shown. Doesn't that bother anyone? For example when an "evil" user is writing a document to send to someone he's stalking and the machine crashes, does he want his evidence to go to M$? Probably not. But seriously this might cause problems..
I read the title of the entry: "Longhorn Beta is Disappointing" I didn't have to read beyond that. In fact, I could've told anyone that without even using it or looking at it. Ha.. (flamebait, oh shit)
"...adds highly anticipated features including tabbed messaging and logging."
As far as I can remember I've been using both of those with Gaim.. I feel like my Gentoo system is in the future sometimes; these products from companies don't provide what I use for years (literally; windows still doesn't officially have virtual desktops as seen in gnome/kde/flux/etc. unless longhorn has it and I don't know about it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Logging in for the first time in at least 3 years for the sole purpose of contributing to the "fuck beta" momentum building up here.
/. going. If they're so determined to drive the majority of us away from this site, may as well have a new place to call home.
I've seen one particulary inspiring comment (can't remember whose quote it is off-hand, sorry) - as a last resort, if the beta movement isn't rescinded then let's do what we always do when an OSS project goes to hell.
Fork it.
Get the fuck away from DICE and get our own
It took me a moment to remember this, but now I remember it much more clearly. MPlayer offered listings of online matches to join with lobbies (chat rooms) that had voice (microphone) support, and they supported many games. I used to play Red Alert frequently via MPlayer since Westwood Online was so lousy and WO didn't have such a concept as a lobby where you can find players who are looking for games. The old MPlayer reminds me of what Xbox Live allows me to do today in some ways. After Gamespot bought out MPlayer it was pretty much all over. I haven't had a decent 3v3 match on the hjk6 map in so many years, now I miss it. Of all the C&C games I've seen, Red Alert was the best and MPlayer really made the multiplayer shine.
I'm really getting an image of their perspective. Unfortunately, CronoCloud, you actually could have argued it better. You stood only on the "feeling" defensive saying that you felt it was better but they keep insisting for a rationalized justification. I would have turned that philosophy around on them. (Note that I too want the protocl icons back.) First of all, if they want to minimize how much code they're maintaining by removing things that they believe serve no purpose, then they perhaps should discard the entire GUI altogether, as it serves no purpose since they have a perfectly functional command-line IM client. But they might argue not having a GUI makes it more confusing and less usable, no, by their philosophy that's just a feeling and it is not enough to matter. In my opinion the command-line is easier to use so why bother maintaining all of that nasty GTK+ code? Throw it away! Screw the touchy-feely users who can't justify their opinions! Hopefully this example gives you the idea I'm trying to establish.
Now let me try to defend the protocol icons. Granted yes I would much rather have them than not, but that's just a feeling so we need something concrete, some facts. I'll list some examples for why you would want it back.
I'm not sure but there may be more legitimate reasons to bring those icons back. CronoCloud, I wish such thinking had occurred to you at the time so you could present this rationale the devs keep asking for. I somewhat suspect they truly don't care about providing to anyone but themselves and they have a point, in which case I wonder why they bothered releasing it to the public to begin with and work with users if they didn't care. They're a complicated bunch. I don't see why they're so picky about having options or even throwing things into a plugin. Having more abilities depending on how you are using the program makes it more powerful. (Example: Reinstating the Send button helps tablet computer users!)
I hope the fork is actually maintained and supported. If the fork maintainers are truly serious, they could effectively cause pidgin to become deprecated except for all the back-end work. So the ideal combination is funpidin for the GUI and pidgin for the back-end (libpurple and protocol support).
Maybe someday we'll see webcams supported so I can kick Kopete off the system?
This has been well overdue in my honest opinion! From every minor release to release we have been seeing subtle UI changes that offer absolutely no choice. The preferences dialog hardly ever changes while other things are changing on me and I'm stuck with the changes.
How about the release where they changed the formatting button bar into two drop-down menus? I'm glad that you can actually revert it back to a useful formatting bar by right-clicking it and selecting the alternative. But the icon changes, the dropping of the emoticons from Gaim 1.5.x, and more things I just don't care to remember right now, I'm tired of it. This is precisely why I left GNOME for XFCE; I still wanted a GTK+ interface but I didn't want to see any more features stripped away from me and stupid UI/dialog box changes because "the last version is too hard for users." (Granted that excuse is not coming from the Pidgin devs.)
I believe my superior grievance lies with Pidgin devs' claim to investigate what gaim-vv attempted: adding support for webcams and/or microphones for the protocols that support it. They posted that this development would be considered after a stable 2.0 release. Well they've had Pidgin 2.0 release a long while back now, and do I see even a hint about what they said? Nope.
Seriously what are they thinking? I can only imagine that, if in their position, obviously Pidgin is (apparently) the most popular GTK+ based IM client. If it were up to me, I would work on expanding the client to support the other functionalities of the supported protocols that are still not implemented, such as the aforementioned audiovisual support and file-transfer support that actually works on protocols other than AIM's.
Not posting as AC because if this is worthy of bad karma than I deserve it. This had to be said. I welcome a fork that works on making progress instead of focusing on satisfying egotistical interface desires of the developers.
I've noticed several suggestions to just encrypt the filesystem with TrueCrypt or use passwords (BIOS, boot loader e.g. GRUB, OS username/password) and that if you refuse to decrypt for them by entering the password, they confiscate the device. Although it seems like the solution is, also aforementioned, to boot into a "dummy" OS with nothing special in it to conceal the fact that another OS with accessible data exists somewhere else on the drive. It would be as easy as using "e" to edit the commands in GRUB to change the root= option to boot the "real" root filesystem.
The object of this post is to consider a foreign government official that obviously has a reason for having something like TrueCrypt on there. What is the consequence in this case? Would such a person, with identification, be allowed to pass without a laptop search? How can security tell what a real foreign ID looks like when a person tries to identify himself as being part of a foreign government? Could I just, for example, fake a French federal agent ID and claim they must not force me to enter the password?
Might be an interesting scenario, I wonder what they'd do...
Makes FORTRAN sound like a type of cancer
What do you mean sound like?! What, it's not?
Just saying that it isn't impossible. I bought my barebone Asus A6km notebook without an OS.
[...] especially with ATI whose drivers are absolutely awful right now.
So when hasn't that been true?
I can only hope this sort of thing promotes the appeal of using OpenGL, so more games are more likely to become cross-compatible. Projects like WineHQ can mimic the behavior of Win32 API, and things would run more smoothly if instead of translating DX, to just have OpenGL games to begin with. Does DX really provide or perform more/better than OpenGL that commercial games continue to use DX??
I hate garbage like this. I swear it's like the people who decide to do stuff like this are fascists and do it on purpose because they can. I mean when XP came out it was so stupid that you had to "hack" it to uninstall MSN messenger! Now this?! My list of reasons to keep using Linux keeps on growing and growing...
With my distro, you won't even get a boot loader if you don't install it! Even years ago on RedHat there was a screen asking how you want to install a boot loader, if at all, offering LILO or GRUB. I never heard of a distro just forcing GRUB down your throat.....
I wonder how well StarFox would run on it. That game really could use a better frame rate. Or I could just grab my N64... I'm sure there are some games, perhaps StarOcean for example, that would run better with an OC'ed SNES?
A new thing for me. Anyway, how many people honestly care what this guy does? I'm sick of hearing his name for pointless reasons. Why is this considered news anyway?
Okay, why does it say that Linux is not good enough of an excuse to get a "naked" PC???
I don't need an excuse. If I was going to buy a computer, I want to buy the hardware, and not be forced to shell out money for software they want to give me if I don't want it. I can't believe they think that OS-less computers are all potential machines to have pirated Windows on it. Honestly the point of getting no OS is just that, to have nothing there; why waste the money on the OS if you're going to erase it anyway? Also, maybe I would buy a computer without an OS because I don't want Windows, period. This has antitrust written all over it, may they burn and die a painful death for all I care. And all I wanted was a laptop with an nVidia card, an AMD CPU, and no OS. I can't find any one laptop with even two of those criteria! (Not blaming MS for this though.)
It's still April 1st.. Slashdot isn't pink anymore, now a genuine post?! What is happening to slashdot? Noooooooo...
I knew it! There is more than just the kiss Leia gave Luke! Incest anyone? :P
Holy fuck I thought my CRT tried to commit suicide!
Any weaknesses it can find in commercially available Web filters will be crucial to the Justice Department's defense of the Child Online Protection Act.
You know, I look at that and wonder.. reminds me of MS, they can't solve a problem themselves so beat it out of someone else who might have the solution. Except this is the government, I'm afraid to see how far they'll go to do what they want... I'm not just being paranoid am I?
Not exactly. How many times has MS done something they shouldn't be able to get away with? Now they ought to be shielded from any mischief coming their way? Ok, they should be burned because of what they did in the past, that isn't right, I agree. But... it shouldn't be how it is, it isn't balanced (in terms of justice). Either they take the headaches they've earned now or they pay the price for their crap in the past. I just think it's bullshit for them to continue their harassment left and right and get protected when they slip into something themselves.
Thanks goes to the other poster for clearing up the whole EU/US mix-up.
Why the hell does the government care how they're treated? I think it's ridiculous, the US says "Please be nice to Bill." What the hell? All the bullshit they pull, like getting patents awarded for stuff a lot of us know they never created themselves, all the stunts they pull to weasel their way into wherever they want more control just to have it, to try to screw over whatever alternatives in the field (you name it, from browsers to consoles.) I say screw them, let the EU be as unfair to them as they want, as if they've been fair with anybody else. About time someone pushed MS around and made them cry for fairness instead of the other way around. Besides, the EU does what it feels it should, (right?) I don't think they'll do things differently because MS requests it.
I recently had to write a program for a network programming class that accepts a URL, determines its host and request and sends out an HTTP request, then takes the resulting HTML and parses it for all URLs within it, and finally ping all the URLs it finds in that HTML page. Now, my program is only as verbose as it had to be but out of curiosity, I wanted to use it to try two URLs I saw in the replies for this post. Seeing how everyone says the command-line browsers all fail, I just had to try it, so here's my first try, and I get results as expected: $ java LinkParser www.photosparks.com Running... Connecting to host: www.photosparks.com Sending server the request: GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Java Host: www.photosparks.com Connection: close Pinging www.photosparks.com (gallery) Requesting /gallery/index.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging www.photosparks.com (weddings)
Requesting /weddings.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging www.photosparks.com (contact)
Requesting /contact.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging www.photosparks.com (home)
Requesting /index.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging www.photosparks.com (portraits)
Requesting /portraitpricing.html
Returned status 200 OK
Pinging sparks.photoreflect.com (click here)
Requesting /
Returned status 302 Redirect
Pinging www.photoreflect.com (click here)
Requesting /
Returned status 302 Redirect
Okay so now I try another one:
$ java LinkParser www.catalogueofships.com
Running...
Connecting to host: www.catalogueofships.com
Sending server the request:
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Java
Host: www.catalogueofships.com
Connection: close
And the output stops there, the program just terminates. I have seen this behavior just once before, the sample testing page the professor offered us. It was hosted on the school server which behaved the same way. (I'm not saying it has the same problem as described with godaddy domain, but the result was the same, the program would just seemingly die.) For our scenario, the server was configured to reject all requests that lacked a User-Agent field in the header; it wouldn't even give a connection refused response.
I'm sure if I make my program more verbose I will discover what others have already found about the problem described.
I thought it would be interesting to post these results, and also, what is the purpose to configure a server to reject requests without a User-Agent? If the answer is to stop abusive network traffic, what is the point, anyone can very easily specify any User-Agent value as I have: I simply put "Java" there, as if the server knows any better!
Okay when I saw the /. entry, I knew I had to say what I got here. The announcement of a security flaw in Firefox is the cause of the decelerating growth? This is insane; immediately I think that everyone assumed that Firefox is totally safe. Gah! It's not a silver bullet! It's good but it can't be perfect. Nothing is! Oh, so Firefox has one problem which will be fixed pretty quickly like most of the OSS world, but people will go and hide behind IE again since they think that the reports are false.
..'!! Every e-mail I got back from their "support" was garbage; all about searching their "Knowledge Base" (which lacked any knowledge about this by the way) and some FAQ URLs. Screw 'em. Let IE burn, it's garbage ever since it's been forced down Windows's throat.
Ugh, how long does it take for IE patches to come out, if ever??? Only if there's a widely-spreading virus or trojan exploiting it, then you get a patch miraculously within a day or two. Otherwise they just wipe your complaining away like a speck of dust. On top of that I bet IE has a lot more problems to worry about than Firefox could ever have. I know it's possible for IE to wipe out files on the hard disk; I doubt Firefox could do it unless there is some sort of ported ActiveX support forcefully ported to Firefox.
Since I mentioned MS wiping you off like dust, I say that because way back when I submitted a report about the Up button not working when IE was in FTP mode. The Up button was calling the same routine that Back did. I tested it by going down a few directories and dumping the entire history cache. Up did not work as Back did not. I knew that was proof that Up didn't work right because you don't need a history to `cd
By the way, I remember the IE4 alpha PNG on the feature list. I was shocked to see it again for IE7. Took long enough! but wait we don't know if they'll actually do it this time.
"...will provide Microsoft with... the contents of documents being created." The words I cut out don't alter the meaning I have shown. Doesn't that bother anyone? For example when an "evil" user is writing a document to send to someone he's stalking and the machine crashes, does he want his evidence to go to M$? Probably not. But seriously this might cause problems..
I read the title of the entry: "Longhorn Beta is Disappointing" I didn't have to read beyond that. In fact, I could've told anyone that without even using it or looking at it. Ha.. (flamebait, oh shit)
"...adds highly anticipated features including tabbed messaging and logging." As far as I can remember I've been using both of those with Gaim.. I feel like my Gentoo system is in the future sometimes; these products from companies don't provide what I use for years (literally; windows still doesn't officially have virtual desktops as seen in gnome/kde/flux/etc. unless longhorn has it and I don't know about it.)