Profiles have been in Firefox since as long as I've known about it (around 0.9 or so), certainly before the Mozilla Suite was canned. They're about as visible as about:config; it's not something a regular user would ever notice. Also, it has no significant performance cost, and can be very important for people who are developing and testing Firefox. They don't what their testing version of Firefox to nuke their real profile. It's also nice for extension developers for pretty much the same reason.
Those issues are directly connected. Vista is a resource hog because of it's DRM. It does a lot of pointless encryption and code checking because of that. Fancy-shinny windows don't take much for system resources, that can be easily seen on OSX and the OpenGL desktops for Linux.
but that's the intitial feeling Windows users get.
Funny, I get the same feeling with Windows. I always attributed the feeling to Windows' poor excuse of a windows manager (no workspaces or alt-click to move). I guess it's more of just a "this is different and I'm not used to it" sort of thing.
i've convinced her that a random popups window are OK (for passwords)
Is this what we've gotten too! What in the world are password supposed to be for anymore! Soon we'll start hearing hackers talk like this:
Hacker 0: Skiddies these days, they have it so easy, all they have to do is make a random popup and users will blindly enter their password.
Hacker 1: Yeah, when I was young we had to go and find their password files, copy it to our own machine, and then use a prog to crack it. That would take hours assuming they used a regular dictionary word.
Hacker 2: Yeah, well, when I was young, we couldn't even get the password files, because they were on *nix machines and/etc/shadow was only readable by root. We had to phone them, up and pretend to be their system administrator or something. This could take days cause you had to go and get information so that you wouldn't make a fool of yourself impersonating the sysadmin.
ODF doesn't even have necessary connection to FOSS. It's just another open standard, like HTML.
As for why this story is interesting? Well, it might be a stretch, but it is possible that there is some correlation between the document counts and the popularity of the formats. That seems almost as likely as our anecdotal evidence on the obscurity of ODF. It wouldn't be news to hear that ODF went largely unused, we would alread assume as much. The fact that there is evidence to the contrary is at least interesting.
Last time I checked, SixApart hadn't quite got the OpenID thing going; however there are many other people involved, some of who are much larger than them. AOL is the classic example (they openid.aol.com/username). There are gads of smaller independent websites and providers.
Oddly enough, Microsoft even promised to support OpenID, we'll see how that one panes out, but don't hold you breath, you might asphyxiate.
Actually, single sign-on can be pretty cool. This is more a bad case of NIH than a solution for a non-problem. OpenID is already out there, it's supported by many sites/software, it works, and it as a second killer feature: it's decentralized. Forcing lame copies of existing standards is pretty typical MS too (see OpenDocument vs OOXML).
How else is firefox supposed to handle protocols liek mailto on a Windows system? The problem is that the URI's shouldn't have been trusted in the first place. The fact that they can execute arbitrary commands is appalling!
The fact that browsers have a protocol attached to them is bad taste, but it's also a red herring. The real problem is that URIs can execute arbitrary commands. Firefox has as much to do with this as a potato has to do with an airliner.
Nobody does - it was a stupid thing to include in the first place
First off, it was called firefoxurl://. Second, it is used - by Windows. This is part of what is required when registering a browser on that OS. It's pretty important if you want to set Firefox as the default browser.
Why is FTP even enabled? For anonymous transfers it makes a little bit of sense, but having it available for authenticated users is a exploit waiting to happen.
Actually, TiVo is under the GPL. It has to be because they've modified the kernel and such. That's the main reason why so many people are up in arms over it.
Yes, but normal users shouldn't have to deal with or know about all this nonsense. That's what we mean when we say "Just Works". If you want a distro that has all the fancy-shiny out of the box, get something like Sabayon; but don't be surprised when it breaks.
That's not a terribly good example. The issue with NVidia drivers in Ubuntu is entirely pragmatic. If you haven't had problems with NVidia drivers not working/breaking, be happy, not everyone is so lucky. Also it's possible that things won't work in the future if NVidia doesn't keep up with kernel/Xorg updates. NVidia has been pretty good about keeping pace with these, but your relying on NVidia's goodwill to continue to do so.
Nice try, but you misread the FSF's statement. The first paragraph says "The GPL permits anyone to make a modified version and use it without ever distributing it to others. What this company is doing is a special case of that. Therefore, the company does not have to release the modified sources."
They go on to explain that if you do want this requirement on your licensing (and they think it's a sensible requirement), you really ought to be using the Affero GPL.
Good point, although I fear we will repeat our past mistakes. We should be careful not to fall prey to the humanist who flatters with the sop that we are all really just good people with a few rough edges. Combine that will a system of morality and suddenly the brutish acts of European imperialism become reasonable, perhaps even righteous. C.S. Lewis wrote a fine essay titled Religion and Rocketry where he points this out.
We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don't. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to the new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. If they meet things stronger, they will be, very properly, destroyed.
Yeah, but it wasn't the cat's fault. Some crazy scientist stuck it in a steel chamber, along with a Geiger counter, a tiny bit of radioactive substance, and a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. For some reason though, there's still a fair amount of conjecture on whether the cat is actually dead or not.
Well, Hawking wouldn't be my first source of authority for the question of whether or not we ought to explore outer space simply for the sake of exploring it. Scientists generally aren't very good with questions of ought-ness. They understand the natural world, and that understanding can be very valuable, but it tends to get them rather muddled up when they go to deal with questions of morality which science is (by design) utterly incapable of handling.
I would trust common sense a bit more, but even that will mislead it's unwary followers.
Well actually, I think it would work the other way around. The people who right NVIDIA drivers should be kernel devs. Whether they work for NVIDIA or not is a secondary issue.
That's how things have work with Linux from the start and it hasn't stopped them from writing high performance code.
And there you assumptions betray you. Not all change is progress and there is nothing glorious about rampaging through the galaxy like a drunken buffoon expanding our Lebensraum. "The next step" for a man on the edge of a mountainous cliff is most certainly not progress (unless, of course, he's going to rappel down and he has the proper equipment). There are good reasons to explore outer space, but don't it's the next step unless you have some good reason for it.
Let's see them for what they are: Organized crime. One day justice will be done, Extremists will be obliterated and the world will be a better place for it.
You can write exploitable kernel modules for Linux as well
Yeah, but someone would have to be an idiot to use it (and a rather hapless one too if you can get them through the install process). All the drivers in the main kernel has worked on by kernel devs, so they are actually responsible for the code. The ones that aren't in the kernel are either:
Crap code that doesn't belong in drivers to begin with.
Binary drivers which have always been a Bad Think.
Really weird stuff that normal people shouldn't touch anyway.
It's not Microsoft's fault that third parties write bad drivers. It is Microsoft's fault that they rely on third parties to write the drivers in the first place.
I agree that nVidia has pretty good drivers and cards (I <3 my new 8800), but they've had the same kinds of problems too. People don't write perfect code and if it's not open, the chances of bugs like these slipping through is very real. This is a problem for both companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Profiles have been in Firefox since as long as I've known about it (around 0.9 or so), certainly before the Mozilla Suite was canned. They're about as visible as about:config; it's not something a regular user would ever notice. Also, it has no significant performance cost, and can be very important for people who are developing and testing Firefox. They don't what their testing version of Firefox to nuke their real profile. It's also nice for extension developers for pretty much the same reason.
Those issues are directly connected. Vista is a resource hog because of it's DRM. It does a lot of pointless encryption and code checking because of that. Fancy-shinny windows don't take much for system resources, that can be easily seen on OSX and the OpenGL desktops for Linux.
Funny, I get the same feeling with Windows. I always attributed the feeling to Windows' poor excuse of a windows manager (no workspaces or alt-click to move). I guess it's more of just a "this is different and I'm not used to it" sort of thing.
Is this what we've gotten too! What in the world are password supposed to be for anymore! Soon we'll start hearing hackers talk like this:
Hacker 0: Skiddies these days, they have it so easy, all they have to do is make a random popup and users will blindly enter their password.
Hacker 1: Yeah, when I was young we had to go and find their password files, copy it to our own machine, and then use a prog to crack it. That would take hours assuming they used a regular dictionary word.
Hacker 2: Yeah, well, when I was young, we couldn't even get the password files, because they were on *nix machines and /etc/shadow was only readable by root. We had to phone them, up and pretend to be their system administrator or something. This could take days cause you had to go and get information so that you wouldn't make a fool of yourself impersonating the sysadmin.
...
ODF doesn't even have necessary connection to FOSS. It's just another open standard, like HTML.
As for why this story is interesting? Well, it might be a stretch, but it is possible that there is some correlation between the document counts and the popularity of the formats. That seems almost as likely as our anecdotal evidence on the obscurity of ODF. It wouldn't be news to hear that ODF went largely unused, we would alread assume as much. The fact that there is evidence to the contrary is at least interesting.
Last time I checked, SixApart hadn't quite got the OpenID thing going; however there are many other people involved, some of who are much larger than them. AOL is the classic example (they openid.aol.com/username). There are gads of smaller independent websites and providers.
Oddly enough, Microsoft even promised to support OpenID, we'll see how that one panes out, but don't hold you breath, you might asphyxiate.
Actually, single sign-on can be pretty cool. This is more a bad case of NIH than a solution for a non-problem. OpenID is already out there, it's supported by many sites/software, it works, and it as a second killer feature: it's decentralized. Forcing lame copies of existing standards is pretty typical MS too (see OpenDocument vs OOXML).
How else is firefox supposed to handle protocols liek mailto on a Windows system? The problem is that the URI's shouldn't have been trusted in the first place. The fact that they can execute arbitrary commands is appalling!
The fact that browsers have a protocol attached to them is bad taste, but it's also a red herring. The real problem is that URIs can execute arbitrary commands. Firefox has as much to do with this as a potato has to do with an airliner.
Yes, but does it run on Linux :)
First off, it was called firefoxurl://. Second, it is used - by Windows. This is part of what is required when registering a browser on that OS. It's pretty important if you want to set Firefox as the default browser.
Why is FTP even enabled? For anonymous transfers it makes a little bit of sense, but having it available for authenticated users is a exploit waiting to happen.
Actually, TiVo is under the GPL. It has to be because they've modified the kernel and such. That's the main reason why so many people are up in arms over it.
Yes, but normal users shouldn't have to deal with or know about all this nonsense. That's what we mean when we say "Just Works". If you want a distro that has all the fancy-shiny out of the box, get something like Sabayon; but don't be surprised when it breaks.
That's not a terribly good example. The issue with NVidia drivers in Ubuntu is entirely pragmatic. If you haven't had problems with NVidia drivers not working/breaking, be happy, not everyone is so lucky. Also it's possible that things won't work in the future if NVidia doesn't keep up with kernel/Xorg updates. NVidia has been pretty good about keeping pace with these, but your relying on NVidia's goodwill to continue to do so.
Nice try, but you misread the FSF's statement. The first paragraph says "The GPL permits anyone to make a modified version and use it without ever distributing it to others. What this company is doing is a special case of that. Therefore, the company does not have to release the modified sources."
They go on to explain that if you do want this requirement on your licensing (and they think it's a sensible requirement), you really ought to be using the Affero GPL.
Good point, although I fear we will repeat our past mistakes. We should be careful not to fall prey to the humanist who flatters with the sop that we are all really just good people with a few rough edges. Combine that will a system of morality and suddenly the brutish acts of European imperialism become reasonable, perhaps even righteous. C.S. Lewis wrote a fine essay titled Religion and Rocketry where he points this out.
Yeah, but it wasn't the cat's fault. Some crazy scientist stuck it in a steel chamber, along with a Geiger counter, a tiny bit of radioactive substance, and a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. For some reason though, there's still a fair amount of conjecture on whether the cat is actually dead or not.
I would trust common sense a bit more, but even that will mislead it's unwary followers.
Well actually, I think it would work the other way around. The people who right NVIDIA drivers should be kernel devs. Whether they work for NVIDIA or not is a secondary issue.
That's how things have work with Linux from the start and it hasn't stopped them from writing high performance code.
And there you assumptions betray you. Not all change is progress and there is nothing glorious about rampaging through the galaxy like a drunken buffoon expanding our Lebensraum. "The next step" for a man on the edge of a mountainous cliff is most certainly not progress (unless, of course, he's going to rappel down and he has the proper equipment). There are good reasons to explore outer space, but don't it's the next step unless you have some good reason for it.
Let's see them for what they are: Organized crime. One day justice will be done, Extremists will be obliterated and the world will be a better place for it.
:head asplodes:
What happened to all the funny little Microsoft partners that were voting last time? They didn't seem to show up on the list this time.
Me Too!
Yeah, but someone would have to be an idiot to use it (and a rather hapless one too if you can get them through the install process). All the drivers in the main kernel has worked on by kernel devs, so they are actually responsible for the code. The ones that aren't in the kernel are either:
It's not Microsoft's fault that third parties write bad drivers. It is Microsoft's fault that they rely on third parties to write the drivers in the first place.
I agree that nVidia has pretty good drivers and cards (I <3 my new 8800), but they've had the same kinds of problems too. People don't write perfect code and if it's not open, the chances of bugs like these slipping through is very real. This is a problem for both companies.