This is one of these tough issues - whose wishes do you want to respect, the grieving family, or the unknown wishes of the recently deceased? Part of me says if they want their family to have access to this stuff, they need to put it in their will - my mother went into the hospital for a serious operation, knowing the possible outcomes, and left me with a long list of stuff, including all of her passwords and the like in case something happened, leaving her incapacitated or worse (obviously, she trusts I'm not going to abuse that, but you can also leave something in a safety deposit box and give the key to your lawyer who holds your will, for example).
Then the other part says if the person didn't make their wishes clear, and they are dead now, then they can't really be "hurt" by anything their family reads, and it seems wrong to deny the family this kind of closure.
I know this for sure - reading these stories should make us all think twice and leave explicit instructions for our loved ones about our private electronic data in our wills, one way or the other.
Ahh, well, I have avoided SP2 due to the many posts I have seen in various forums complaining about it. In any case, that's not about to get me running back to using IE, but maybe it will at least mean less spyware on other people's computers. Fewer PCs to scrub for family members. Maybe.
If you are a reasonably cautious computer user, then IE *IS* the source of all of the spyware on your computer. I haven't gotten spyware of any sort on my computer since I stopped using IE ages ago and started using Mozilla as my regular browser (and now FF). This is because I'm cautious about what I download and execute on my computer, as everybody should be - but the problem with IE is that it doesn't matter if you are cautious, if something installs itself through an ActiveX security zone exploit. The only time I got spyware on my computer was when my roommate's girlfriend used my PC and opened up IE and surfed around for a few hours, leaving me with about 20-30 pieces of spyware installed.
Spyware installed with random other apps can already affect FF users just as much as IE users if they aren't cautious about what they download and run, so I don't know what you mean about "one day".
I agree it would be nice if better security permissioning were instituted in Windows, but this is really in the realm of the OS, not the web browser, and I hardly think it's FF's fault.
I don't understand, a malicious piece of software that you run on your computer can essentially do and modify anything with the Windows security model. If a piece of software can modify arbitrary files on your machine, then it can do any fucking thing it wants, including patching the Firefox executable to puke out weird error messages, or whatever. Whether extensions are "signed" or not would make absolutely no difference, and this problem affects IE and every other browser I know of just as much as it does Firefox.
You ALWAYS assume this risk when you install software from X random shareware company (which is why I try to stick with stuff that's up on download.com and generally used by many people). Short of some oppressive system of "secure computing", this is a basic fact of life with modern computers. It's always "let the downloader beware" and "make sure you trust the source of stuff you download and run".
WTF are you talking about? FF tells you clearly when a site is trying to install an XPI file, you just have to click the Allow button on the yellow bar on top of the page to whitelist the site before it will be allowed to prompt you for XPI installation.
This was done as a security measure to prevent malicious attempts to install unwanted (spyware) XPI files on sketchy sites, which started to happen. I wish to god IE would do the same thing with Browser Helper Objects, and any ActiveX objects for that matter.
Rule #1 of business: It's hard to make a billion bucks without starting with at least a few million (or 10) first.
It takes more than just brains and business sense to make money, it takes capital, and it's hard to get capital without taking smaller amounts of capital and making larger amounts of capital (well, banks are willing to loan you some money, but ironically, only if you have money or assets to back the loan first).
Most people who make a billion dollars in their lifetime start with a base of some wealth to work from. It's not impossible to go from zero, it's just much harder, since you have to get to a few tens of millions first - in other words, you need that many more lucky streaks, brains, business sense, whatever, without any big busts or screwups in the middle.
Ya know Donald Trump? His father was a successful real estate developer in the outer boroughs of New York in the first half of this century. Donald took his fathers business, and had the courage and built the connections needed to take it into Manhattan and pursue bigger projects. In other words, he brought something to the table, but no, he didn't do it all from scratch.
In any case, this is pretty obvious stuff. We can't all leave our children billions of dollars, but you don't need to, to give them the tools to be financial successful. It's not so hard to make and save a few million dollars over the course of your career, by always underspending your earnings, saving money, making smart investments and so on. And giving your children a financially stable platform gives them the opportunity to explore career options and take bigger risks in general, which is a good thing for more than just financial success, it gives you more opportunities to find a career that is rewarding and in tune with your goals in life.
It's hinted at several places, but I don't think people really resent true immigrants - those who come here, with their families to build a new life in America. One of my best friends (and roommates) in college was from an Indian family that had come here when he was a little kid (he lived most of the first 5 years of his life in India). Anyway, I have no problem with that, and I believe that immigration is part of what makes America great. I welcome immigrant Indians who plan on staying and building the next generation of high tech companies.
The problem is that most H-1B visa holders plan on returning to their country of origin and taking their experience with them, where they will found outsourcing companies to take jobs back overseas, having come here and pushed wages down below those that would be acceptable to full-time residents and citizens.
I don't blame the workers, they are cogs in an exploitative system. I blame the big tech companies that have pushed the industry to this, and the government that quivers in fear at closing the H1B loophole and actually enforcing the rules of the H1B program (comparable salary, advertisement for positions domestically, etc.). The small tech companies end up with little choice to compete but to buy into the H1B system, or outsource large chunks of their work, and the body shops and intermediary firms that place H1B workers with smaller tech shops exploit the FUCK out of these people.
I was a hiring manager and I at one point had several temp. H1B workers working for me back in 2000 when we couldn't fill positions fast enough. I felt terrible for these folks, whose visas were held by a body shop, and who were essentially being rented out to various tech companies in the Boston area (and elsewhere). At the time at least, the quality of the work they did was highly variable - some were good workers and good programmers, some had obviously just been scraped off the streets and given a month or two of "training" and couldn't write code for their lives.
Oh, and their resumes were all completely forged by the placement firms that owned their visas - we discovered several guys named "Kumar" and "Jalakrishnan" who had done exactly the same projects for Indian software companies, separated by 6 years on their resumes (you could see the descriptions had been cut and pasted from one template resume to another). Bah.
The first ever virtual Treasure Island is for sale in Project Entropia, a Massive Multi-Player Online Universe with a real cash economy. This extremely desirable piece of real estate promises to make the highest bidder very rich and very influential within the rapidly growing Project Entropia universe.
So the reason it might be worth paying 26k for this virtual island is that there is a real cash economy in the "game" - in other words, presumably the in-game resources he can extract from his island can presumably be sold or utilized to make items in the game that can be exchanged for real US dollars. So it's a virtual investment, but one that has potential real-world payoff.
All these damned Secunia bugs are basically human error bugs anyway. If you know what's in the popup, it's impossible to be spoofed - if the URL bar shows a site that's not what you expect, close it.
In general, it's always going to be possible if you are browsing sketchy and secure sites at the same time that the sketchy site might pop up some deceptive window, and if you are confused, and can't see the URL bar, you might think it came from the secure site, with or without this specific injection issue. Which is why this workaround out to be default behavior anyway (I HATE sites that try to hide my location bar and navigation toolbar, those bastards).
Anyway, the point is, yes the issue should be fixed, but if you applied the workaround, it makes the exploit essentially worthless to an adversary.
Jamie, I'm not sure if you're mistaken or if something has been changed in the last month or two, but your IP blocking provisions certainly were kicking in WAY before 50 accesses in one hour.
I had a Slashdot RSS feed live bookmark in Firefox (supposedly gets checked once an hour, or when the browser is started up), and that got me temporarily banned (perhaps I had restarted the browser several times in an hour for some reason, but it certainly wasn't 50 times!).
Like I said, hopefully you have upped the ban factor to something more sane like 50, but the rep you guys got for your "jackbooted" policy on RSS was well deserved.
While I appreciate some of your points and have no reason to disagree with any of your medical analysis, your points about self-diagnosing and doctor-shopping are way off base.
I have gone through this several times with my mother, who has had colon cancer for about 4 years now. In her case, the initial diagnosis was not the problem, that was crystal clear. But when it came to treatment - yes, we did LOTS of doctor shopping and had multiple independent doctors (who were not active clinicians anymore) working as our advisors. Why? Because oncology isn't an exact science and lots of opinions differed substantially. And we are talking about the best doctors at the topmost institutions (we live in New York, so Sloan-Kettering, New York Hospital, Columbia-Presyterian, etc., and eventually in other cities as well).
At the time the opinion of several top-notch oncologists (including Lenny Saltz at Sloan-Kettering) was that she had less than a year to live. She's still around and doing well 4 years later, because we eventually got a surgical consult with a supposedly "fringe" surgical oncologist in Washington DC, Dr. Paul Sugarbaker. His work seems to be vaguely disrespected in the broader medical community because he selects patients based on criteria that they don't like - namely that they have to be young enough and healthy enough to survive and recover from extensive surgery.
Then there was the more recent event where a prominent surgeon in New York operated on her again and insisted that a new tumor she had was a primary cholangiocarcinoma, which the pathologists initially confirmed. I collected evidence, consulted with physicians, gathered old tumor slides and arranged for a comparative pathology analysis with the blessing of her (thankfully cooperative) current oncologist and sure enough, the surgeon was absolutely wrong (it was the same tumor tissue, mutation types and so on, the pathologists had misinterpreted the die stain results to reach the conclusions that the surgeon "wanted").
Had it not been for my insistent diagnostic work, my mother's recurrent cancer would have been misdiagnosed and treated with the wrong drugs. I have also caught several medical errors of other sorts over the last several years. I have unfortunately learned that the only way to get random residents (who are usually the most uncooperative doctors) to listen is to smack them down with a really obnoxious statement about where I went to college (Harvard) and put them in their place. More senior doctors usually know enough to recognize the limitations in their own knowledge and more importantly in the amount of time they have to allocate to each patient, and are usually more cooperative.
Anyway, doctor shopping itself shouldn't raise red flags. In my mother's case the shopping was mostly for treatment options, but I can imagine if the disease was itself rare or difficult to diagnose, one might have to shop around for diagnoses.
I have seen one case among people I know of a paranoid person who doctor shopped until she got the diagnosis she was looking for, which the rest of her doctors believed was wrong - and in that case the doctor-shopping was a sign of hypochondria. In all other cases, it's been justified, and generally the result of my friends being smarter than many of the arrogant doctors who've treated them. I don't claim to have an easy method for separating the hypochondriacs from the reasonably concerned patient who hasn't received a properly comprehensive diagnosis, but I'd say it's far safer to assume that a patient isn't a hypochondriac until proven otherwise, to avoid killing a legitimately concerned patient because they raise supposed "red flags" for you.
I am allergic to shellfish, and looking at pictures of shrimp, or ads on TV featuring shrimp actually does make me physically nauseous. As for gay sex - I definitely don't find the idea appealing, but seeing a picture of it isn't going to make me hurl or anything.
Try it again - the extension now works with background loaded tabs too, so if you tend to surf/. by opening each link in a new tab, this update will fix the problem.
The only known issue left is that the fix is only triggered when the pageload is complete. So as long as your Slashdot page views are finished loading, the rendering should be fixed.
A) it forces a reflow in the rendering engine, it doesn't actually reload the page. Completely different things.
B) You can of course do it manually with CTRL+/- or CTRL-mousewheel. For most of us however, since around FF 0.8 this bug has become such a frequent problem that the extension saves lots of annoying twiddling around on each pageload.
Thanks, but just because you keep repeating it doesn't make it right. I bought it, I own it, such is the way property rights work. It's a system that's been built on well over a thousand years of common law and several hundred years of written law and formal jurisprudence.
Just because software companies want to throw that all away and play semantic games that a few judges have let them squeak by with doesn't mean I have to bend over and take it. I don't think I'm too cool for anything, I just prefer to patronize companies that aren't trying to overthrow the entire concept of fair use and property rights to get legal backing to fuck over their customers out of fear of the people who illegally copy their software.
So basically you're saying that you pay 50 dollars, and there's at least 50% chance you'll get to play the game you bought. Wow, sounds like fun to me.
You can even get ActiveX in Firefox if you want it with the ActiveX extension. It's definitely not perfect since a lot of sites that use ActiveX also use lots of IE-specific, non-standard Javascript with it. But for simple ActiveX embedded video player components and stuff, like on launch.yahoo.com and mtv.com it works like a charm. And by default it is just configured to let a few plugin classids run, so random spyware stuff can't run or install itself.
Still probably not as secure as not using ActiveX at all, but if you really want it, it's nice to have the option, and the level of control you have is much nicer than you'd get with IE. Somebody (maybe me) will probably clean it up soon and make a nice GUI to configure the options for the ActiveX plugin more easily so you don't need to edit any text files too.
The devs didn't want to ship the rendering engine with the patch, which has been around for months, because it supposedly causes some other regression that hasn't been fixed yet - the fix is checked in on the Mozilla 1.8 branch, and you can download the 1.8 alpha release and this problem will never occur. As annoying as it is, I understand where the developers were coming from (not sure I agree with them however, given how high profile/. is with the early adopter market).
Basically, this is a demonstration of a strong development process at work in the FF/Mozilla team - however, it is also a demonstration of the Cathedral-like nature of Mozilla development - if it was up to the users, it's pretty clear this would have been checked in (lots of people seemed to want this bug to go Aviary-1.0-blocking).
In any case, it is a demonstration of the value of a strong extension model for Mozilla, and the value of modularity in software, not of Open Source per se. Actually digging into the core rendering code for Gecko and fixing the bug that was blocking the real fix's checkin is definitely beyond my abilities without spending months worth of rampup time.
Yes it does. I think you are mistaken. Take a minute to understand how it works and you'll understand that it necessarily works, within the limitations discussed on my web site. There's nothing to "not work" - it's about 10 lines of Javascript that force a page reflow. The limitations I've already describe hold true - it is triggered by a page load event on slashdot.org, meaning the page has to be finished loading (so if/. hangs while loading which happens every once in a blue moon for me, but may happen more often if your network configuration is screwy), it won't work. And if you load/. pages in background tabs (i.e. default middle click setting), the page load event apparently never gets triggered either - but I consider that a Firefox issue where the API isn't properly working, not an issue with my fix.
Learn to read the instructions before you start whining, people.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM Laywer: I'm thinking of a settlement that we'd be satisfied with. I'll write it down on a piece of paper.
/ /__ \ / _/ |
SCO Lawyer: OK
_____ _ ____
_/ ___:\/ \/_:___\____
___:_) (_:__
__:_) (_:__ ___
\ __:_) (__:__
|
\___) \_/ (__/
This is one of these tough issues - whose wishes do you want to respect, the grieving family, or the unknown wishes of the recently deceased? Part of me says if they want their family to have access to this stuff, they need to put it in their will - my mother went into the hospital for a serious operation, knowing the possible outcomes, and left me with a long list of stuff, including all of her passwords and the like in case something happened, leaving her incapacitated or worse (obviously, she trusts I'm not going to abuse that, but you can also leave something in a safety deposit box and give the key to your lawyer who holds your will, for example).
Then the other part says if the person didn't make their wishes clear, and they are dead now, then they can't really be "hurt" by anything their family reads, and it seems wrong to deny the family this kind of closure.
I know this for sure - reading these stories should make us all think twice and leave explicit instructions for our loved ones about our private electronic data in our wills, one way or the other.
I think your post can best be summarized by the last two words: "LA sucks".
Ahh, well, I have avoided SP2 due to the many posts I have seen in various forums complaining about it. In any case, that's not about to get me running back to using IE, but maybe it will at least mean less spyware on other people's computers. Fewer PCs to scrub for family members. Maybe.
If you are a reasonably cautious computer user, then IE *IS* the source of all of the spyware on your computer. I haven't gotten spyware of any sort on my computer since I stopped using IE ages ago and started using Mozilla as my regular browser (and now FF). This is because I'm cautious about what I download and execute on my computer, as everybody should be - but the problem with IE is that it doesn't matter if you are cautious, if something installs itself through an ActiveX security zone exploit. The only time I got spyware on my computer was when my roommate's girlfriend used my PC and opened up IE and surfed around for a few hours, leaving me with about 20-30 pieces of spyware installed.
Spyware installed with random other apps can already affect FF users just as much as IE users if they aren't cautious about what they download and run, so I don't know what you mean about "one day".
I agree it would be nice if better security permissioning were instituted in Windows, but this is really in the realm of the OS, not the web browser, and I hardly think it's FF's fault.
I don't understand, a malicious piece of software that you run on your computer can essentially do and modify anything with the Windows security model. If a piece of software can modify arbitrary files on your machine, then it can do any fucking thing it wants, including patching the Firefox executable to puke out weird error messages, or whatever. Whether extensions are "signed" or not would make absolutely no difference, and this problem affects IE and every other browser I know of just as much as it does Firefox.
You ALWAYS assume this risk when you install software from X random shareware company (which is why I try to stick with stuff that's up on download.com and generally used by many people). Short of some oppressive system of "secure computing", this is a basic fact of life with modern computers. It's always "let the downloader beware" and "make sure you trust the source of stuff you download and run".
WTF are you talking about? FF tells you clearly when a site is trying to install an XPI file, you just have to click the Allow button on the yellow bar on top of the page to whitelist the site before it will be allowed to prompt you for XPI installation.
This was done as a security measure to prevent malicious attempts to install unwanted (spyware) XPI files on sketchy sites, which started to happen. I wish to god IE would do the same thing with Browser Helper Objects, and any ActiveX objects for that matter.
Rule #1 of business: It's hard to make a billion bucks without starting with at least a few million (or 10) first.
It takes more than just brains and business sense to make money, it takes capital, and it's hard to get capital without taking smaller amounts of capital and making larger amounts of capital (well, banks are willing to loan you some money, but ironically, only if you have money or assets to back the loan first).
Most people who make a billion dollars in their lifetime start with a base of some wealth to work from. It's not impossible to go from zero, it's just much harder, since you have to get to a few tens of millions first - in other words, you need that many more lucky streaks, brains, business sense, whatever, without any big busts or screwups in the middle.
Ya know Donald Trump? His father was a successful real estate developer in the outer boroughs of New York in the first half of this century. Donald took his fathers business, and had the courage and built the connections needed to take it into Manhattan and pursue bigger projects. In other words, he brought something to the table, but no, he didn't do it all from scratch.
In any case, this is pretty obvious stuff. We can't all leave our children billions of dollars, but you don't need to, to give them the tools to be financial successful. It's not so hard to make and save a few million dollars over the course of your career, by always underspending your earnings, saving money, making smart investments and so on. And giving your children a financially stable platform gives them the opportunity to explore career options and take bigger risks in general, which is a good thing for more than just financial success, it gives you more opportunities to find a career that is rewarding and in tune with your goals in life.
It's hinted at several places, but I don't think people really resent true immigrants - those who come here, with their families to build a new life in America. One of my best friends (and roommates) in college was from an Indian family that had come here when he was a little kid (he lived most of the first 5 years of his life in India). Anyway, I have no problem with that, and I believe that immigration is part of what makes America great. I welcome immigrant Indians who plan on staying and building the next generation of high tech companies.
The problem is that most H-1B visa holders plan on returning to their country of origin and taking their experience with them, where they will found outsourcing companies to take jobs back overseas, having come here and pushed wages down below those that would be acceptable to full-time residents and citizens.
I don't blame the workers, they are cogs in an exploitative system. I blame the big tech companies that have pushed the industry to this, and the government that quivers in fear at closing the H1B loophole and actually enforcing the rules of the H1B program (comparable salary, advertisement for positions domestically, etc.). The small tech companies end up with little choice to compete but to buy into the H1B system, or outsource large chunks of their work, and the body shops and intermediary firms that place H1B workers with smaller tech shops exploit the FUCK out of these people.
I was a hiring manager and I at one point had several temp. H1B workers working for me back in 2000 when we couldn't fill positions fast enough. I felt terrible for these folks, whose visas were held by a body shop, and who were essentially being rented out to various tech companies in the Boston area (and elsewhere). At the time at least, the quality of the work they did was highly variable - some were good workers and good programmers, some had obviously just been scraped off the streets and given a month or two of "training" and couldn't write code for their lives.
Oh, and their resumes were all completely forged by the placement firms that owned their visas - we discovered several guys named "Kumar" and "Jalakrishnan" who had done exactly the same projects for Indian software companies, separated by 6 years on their resumes (you could see the descriptions had been cut and pasted from one template resume to another). Bah.
Since nobody bothers to RTFA anymore:
The first ever virtual Treasure Island is for sale in Project Entropia, a Massive Multi-Player Online Universe with a real cash economy. This extremely desirable piece of real estate promises to make the highest bidder very rich and very influential within the rapidly growing Project Entropia universe.
So the reason it might be worth paying 26k for this virtual island is that there is a real cash economy in the "game" - in other words, presumably the in-game resources he can extract from his island can presumably be sold or utilized to make items in the game that can be exchanged for real US dollars. So it's a virtual investment, but one that has potential real-world payoff.
And in Korea, old people talk to their PCs.
Your co-workers would think you were a nutjob if they saw half of what you posted as AC to Slashdot.
As AC? Shit man, most people would think I was nuts if they saw half of what I posted _with_ my username.
All these damned Secunia bugs are basically human error bugs anyway. If you know what's in the popup, it's impossible to be spoofed - if the URL bar shows a site that's not what you expect, close it.
In general, it's always going to be possible if you are browsing sketchy and secure sites at the same time that the sketchy site might pop up some deceptive window, and if you are confused, and can't see the URL bar, you might think it came from the secure site, with or without this specific injection issue. Which is why this workaround out to be default behavior anyway (I HATE sites that try to hide my location bar and navigation toolbar, those bastards).
Anyway, the point is, yes the issue should be fixed, but if you applied the workaround, it makes the exploit essentially worthless to an adversary.
Jamie, I'm not sure if you're mistaken or if something has been changed in the last month or two, but your IP blocking provisions certainly were kicking in WAY before 50 accesses in one hour.
I had a Slashdot RSS feed live bookmark in Firefox (supposedly gets checked once an hour, or when the browser is started up), and that got me temporarily banned (perhaps I had restarted the browser several times in an hour for some reason, but it certainly wasn't 50 times!).
Like I said, hopefully you have upped the ban factor to something more sane like 50, but the rep you guys got for your "jackbooted" policy on RSS was well deserved.
That was definitely the post of the week. Unless it was the "In Korea, ... is for old people" post. Can't make up my mind.
While I appreciate some of your points and have no reason to disagree with any of your medical analysis, your points about self-diagnosing and doctor-shopping are way off base.
I have gone through this several times with my mother, who has had colon cancer for about 4 years now. In her case, the initial diagnosis was not the problem, that was crystal clear. But when it came to treatment - yes, we did LOTS of doctor shopping and had multiple independent doctors (who were not active clinicians anymore) working as our advisors. Why? Because oncology isn't an exact science and lots of opinions differed substantially. And we are talking about the best doctors at the topmost institutions (we live in New York, so Sloan-Kettering, New York Hospital, Columbia-Presyterian, etc., and eventually in other cities as well).
At the time the opinion of several top-notch oncologists (including Lenny Saltz at Sloan-Kettering) was that she had less than a year to live. She's still around and doing well 4 years later, because we eventually got a surgical consult with a supposedly "fringe" surgical oncologist in Washington DC, Dr. Paul Sugarbaker. His work seems to be vaguely disrespected in the broader medical community because he selects patients based on criteria that they don't like - namely that they have to be young enough and healthy enough to survive and recover from extensive surgery.
Then there was the more recent event where a prominent surgeon in New York operated on her again and insisted that a new tumor she had was a primary cholangiocarcinoma, which the pathologists initially confirmed. I collected evidence, consulted with physicians, gathered old tumor slides and arranged for a comparative pathology analysis with the blessing of her (thankfully cooperative) current oncologist and sure enough, the surgeon was absolutely wrong (it was the same tumor tissue, mutation types and so on, the pathologists had misinterpreted the die stain results to reach the conclusions that the surgeon "wanted").
Had it not been for my insistent diagnostic work, my mother's recurrent cancer would have been misdiagnosed and treated with the wrong drugs. I have also caught several medical errors of other sorts over the last several years. I have unfortunately learned that the only way to get random residents (who are usually the most uncooperative doctors) to listen is to smack them down with a really obnoxious statement about where I went to college (Harvard) and put them in their place. More senior doctors usually know enough to recognize the limitations in their own knowledge and more importantly in the amount of time they have to allocate to each patient, and are usually more cooperative.
Anyway, doctor shopping itself shouldn't raise red flags. In my mother's case the shopping was mostly for treatment options, but I can imagine if the disease was itself rare or difficult to diagnose, one might have to shop around for diagnoses.
I have seen one case among people I know of a paranoid person who doctor shopped until she got the diagnosis she was looking for, which the rest of her doctors believed was wrong - and in that case the doctor-shopping was a sign of hypochondria. In all other cases, it's been justified, and generally the result of my friends being smarter than many of the arrogant doctors who've treated them. I don't claim to have an easy method for separating the hypochondriacs from the reasonably concerned patient who hasn't received a properly comprehensive diagnosis, but I'd say it's far safer to assume that a patient isn't a hypochondriac until proven otherwise, to avoid killing a legitimately concerned patient because they raise supposed "red flags" for you.
I am allergic to shellfish, and looking at pictures of shrimp, or ads on TV featuring shrimp actually does make me physically nauseous. As for gay sex - I definitely don't find the idea appealing, but seeing a picture of it isn't going to make me hurl or anything.
Try it again - the extension now works with background loaded tabs too, so if you tend to surf /. by opening each link in a new tab, this update will fix the problem.
The only known issue left is that the fix is only triggered when the pageload is complete. So as long as your Slashdot page views are finished loading, the rendering should be fixed.
A) it forces a reflow in the rendering engine, it doesn't actually reload the page. Completely different things.
B) You can of course do it manually with CTRL+/- or CTRL-mousewheel. For most of us however, since around FF 0.8 this bug has become such a frequent problem that the extension saves lots of annoying twiddling around on each pageload.
Slashfix was updated today, the new build now works with background loaded tabs too. Try it again. :)
Thanks, but just because you keep repeating it doesn't make it right. I bought it, I own it, such is the way property rights work. It's a system that's been built on well over a thousand years of common law and several hundred years of written law and formal jurisprudence.
Just because software companies want to throw that all away and play semantic games that a few judges have let them squeak by with doesn't mean I have to bend over and take it. I don't think I'm too cool for anything, I just prefer to patronize companies that aren't trying to overthrow the entire concept of fair use and property rights to get legal backing to fuck over their customers out of fear of the people who illegally copy their software.
So basically you're saying that you pay 50 dollars, and there's at least 50% chance you'll get to play the game you bought. Wow, sounds like fun to me.
You can even get ActiveX in Firefox if you want it with the ActiveX extension. It's definitely not perfect since a lot of sites that use ActiveX also use lots of IE-specific, non-standard Javascript with it. But for simple ActiveX embedded video player components and stuff, like on launch.yahoo.com and mtv.com it works like a charm. And by default it is just configured to let a few plugin classids run, so random spyware stuff can't run or install itself.
Still probably not as secure as not using ActiveX at all, but if you really want it, it's nice to have the option, and the level of control you have is much nicer than you'd get with IE. Somebody (maybe me) will probably clean it up soon and make a nice GUI to configure the options for the ActiveX plugin more easily so you don't need to edit any text files too.
The devs didn't want to ship the rendering engine with the patch, which has been around for months, because it supposedly causes some other regression that hasn't been fixed yet - the fix is checked in on the Mozilla 1.8 branch, and you can download the 1.8 alpha release and this problem will never occur. As annoying as it is, I understand where the developers were coming from (not sure I agree with them however, given how high profile /. is with the early adopter market).
Basically, this is a demonstration of a strong development process at work in the FF/Mozilla team - however, it is also a demonstration of the Cathedral-like nature of Mozilla development - if it was up to the users, it's pretty clear this would have been checked in (lots of people seemed to want this bug to go Aviary-1.0-blocking).
In any case, it is a demonstration of the value of a strong extension model for Mozilla, and the value of modularity in software, not of Open Source per se. Actually digging into the core rendering code for Gecko and fixing the bug that was blocking the real fix's checkin is definitely beyond my abilities without spending months worth of rampup time.
Yes it does. I think you are mistaken. Take a minute to understand how it works and you'll understand that it necessarily works, within the limitations discussed on my web site. There's nothing to "not work" - it's about 10 lines of Javascript that force a page reflow. The limitations I've already describe hold true - it is triggered by a page load event on slashdot.org, meaning the page has to be finished loading (so if /. hangs while loading which happens every once in a blue moon for me, but may happen more often if your network configuration is screwy), it won't work. And if you load /. pages in background tabs (i.e. default middle click setting), the page load event apparently never gets triggered either - but I consider that a Firefox issue where the API isn't properly working, not an issue with my fix.
Learn to read the instructions before you start whining, people.