Doesn't anybody have to take history classes anymore?
The bit about "from the Maas to the Memel" just might conceivably upset the Poles, Lithuanians, and Russians just a tad, considering that they acquired the bits of Germany east of the latter river and west of the Oder in 1945. Note that one of the prerequisites for German reunification was that united Germany was required to renounce for all time any claim whatsoever to those territories. In fact (IIRC) a clause stupulating this was added to the Grundgesetz (Basic Law, i.e. Constitution).
I suppose one could make a case for changing it to "from the Maas to the Oder" but I imagine it would still leave a bitter taste in the mouths of those whose nations were intended to provide Lebensraum in the Nazis' Drang nach Osten.
Why the heck does/. keep posting stories at this site? MozillaQuest's content can be summed up as 1/3 FUD, 1/3 idiocy, and 1/3 plagiarism. At best it can can termed a "wannabe" site, and I'm more inclined simply to label it a travesty.
This story was originally posted at MozillaZine on Thursday. For anybody who visits MozillaZine or who has the Mozilla Sidebar turned on in their/. preferences, this is both a bad joke and stale news. Get with it,/. editors! There's just no excuse for this kind of sloppiness.
I hope it's true this time. I am soooo tired of Qwest dragging its sorry butt when I live in between two neighbourhoods that have DSL and I can't get it because "We don't believe that it's the right demographic for expansion into that particular area at this time." That's what they actually told me, believe it or not -- and that's also their rationale for continuing to have crappy phone service -- the lines are so bad here, I can't get more than 14.4 on a 56k modem. Did I mention also that I live less than two miles from the State U. and the local "Technology Corridor"? Blarg.
The MozillaQuest site itself is so badly executed and so sophomoronic in content as to place it beyond the bounds of credibility or even lampoonability. How anyone can come up with "October + ? = 2002" is simply beyond me -- unless they've an ulterior motive. That funny biz with the screenshots and graphs struck me as an amateurish (but still annoying) attempt at disinformation.
It's just so fscking sad that anyone would even link to it, much less give it guaranteed traffic by posting a story from it as "news" here.
/. editors, please don't choose articles when you've been smoking crack. You'll just continue to embarass yourselves and waste our time. Thank you.
In the meantime, I plan to continue to ignore MozillaQuest and hope that it'll just go away.
BTW, I'm using Mozilla 0.9.3 exclusively for my email and it kicks butt (and I don't have to worry about.vbs viruses on my Windows boxes).
...every desktop user needs these features, but MS has never bundled these applications -- why should they, since they have a de facto monopoly on word processing and spreadsheets, they just continue to rake in the dough. This punishment makes them practice what they preach and punishes them by depriving them of the revenue from Word and Excel.
This is just devious enough that it actually appeals to me. Maybe we should give it a try.
<grin/>
That's why I say anxiety is the drug of choice for millions of TV viewers...
And people think I'm weird because I don't watch TV news... or much TV at all, come to think of it.
I spent about 4 or 5 years as a radio station news director/reporter/announcer. Strange (and IMNSHO very bad) things happen to information when (a) you're forced to reduce it to 30-second chunks that have nothing to do with logic and (b) every second or third story has to be suffixed with a "hook" terminating in "Details after this..." leading into a commercial break. The distinction between information and entertainment becomes blurred, even for the announcer. Everyone gets hooked on the hooks. Both announcer and audience become locked into a vicious cycle; we turn ourselves into a giant gibbering gaggle of crisis junkies. The content itself ceases to matter.
In the not too distant future, we'll all be going around in our usual routine, except that every 60 or 90 seconds, we'll all stop and wait nervously for 30 seconds, then resume whatever it was that we were doing before. Blarg.
Anyhow, that's one of the reasons I got out of the biz.
Ex-newsman concludes rant... We'll have more, right after this...
(P.S. Sometimes Jon Katz pisses me off. But I say keep him around anyway.)
Just as virtually every other app on the Linux desktop is converging onto either the KDE or GNOME widget sets, Mozilla intoduces a new proprietary way to do things, totally seperate to anything else.
For those of you playing along at home: Mozilla uses its own widget set -- just like MSIE 5+ does -- because of the demands of HTML4+ and CSS. Microsoft had to add internal widgets not pulled from the OS in moving from IE4 to IE 5 for the same reason. Think about form widgets + CSS-P.
A smaller group of Netscape defenders will parrot some bogus story about Netscape 5 being released a couple years ago. Unfortunately, they are lying -- there was never anything called Netscape 5 released.
The c|net article linked to above has apparently been updated to include the M$ retraction. However, it also says that Bloomberg (original source) maintains that it's sticking by the story.
Great, so when I go to Nissan's website with iCab, all I see is a black background because it doesn't know what browser I have and uses JavaScript to check for IE or Netscape.
This is not the fault of there being multiple browsers, it's the fault of boneheads who don't take advantage of features like object detection in their scripts.
Now a lot of people think Netscape/Mozilla can save us because it's supposedly standards compliant. Well, read the article here. Customized browser versions used to customize conent for the browser.
We're talking about XUL here, which is a standards-compliant subset of XML. Strictly speaking, this isn't about customizing content as such, it's about customizing the user interface.
Admittedly, this sort of control over the UI is also one of the driving forces behind Microsoft's integration strategy: the difference is that the Microsoft way means Windows-only, and the XUL way works the same across all supported platforms.
The other nice difference, at least for many Web developers, is that we don't have to code in C or Java anymore -- we can use XML and JavaScript instead.
I hope this helps clear up any confusion caused by the AOL droid's misuse of terminology.:)
Kudos to the/.er who got first Stanislaw Lem post.:) The Michael Kandel translations are the ones you want.
Lem's wordplay is utterly fantastic -- and Kandel's job of conveying that in English is indescribably awesome.:)
...
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Poul Anderson. In particular I remember reading Trader to the Stars when I was a kid and loving it. Of course, just about anything with his name on the cover is worthwhile.
There's also A. E. van Vogt: Slan, The Players of Null-A, The Darkness on Diamondia, and The War Against the Rull. (The Rull are really, REALLY scary when you think about them... ST 20|IN 20 [telepathic]|WI 25 [collective entity]|DX 25 [8 appendages IIRC]|CO 20|CH -5 [coercive abilities + pure ugliness]... up to 6 attacks/round, +2 to hit, damagewise they can rip the meat off your body bare-handed -- er, tentacled.)
Other faves:
Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series
Fred Pohl's The Cool War -- but then I guess I just happen to like dystopic humour
A Canticle For Leibowitz (might be a little dark for a 13-year-old, but I read it as a teen and it didn't seem to warp me too badly)
There's also a series by Madelein L'Engle I think I read in junior high about four kids who could dimension doorway or something like that... anybody recall the title(s)?
Keith is correct -- since I do some VC++ and VB coding on my Win95 machine, my original MSVC runtimes have long since been replaced. (Both are version 6.00.8168.0, btw.) In the case of my Win98 box at work, I figure either it comes with sufficiently recent versions by default or else these have been supplied by IE5 and/or Office2k.
At any rate, I stand corrected. In my favor, I can say that I started wondering about it, went and read the release notes in full, then wandered back in here to eat a little crow. Thanks for setting me straight.:)
Re your "note to Win32 users": Since when? I used the straight zipfile, deleting everything in/bin along with/windows/mozregistry.dat before unzipping the new one, and it fired up just great, picked up my prefs and bookmarks and saved passwords, etc.
1. I notice this one's out more or less on schedule, without said schedule being altered ex post facto. (That's not a troll, just an observation -- I'm 110% behind Moz, and don't really care when the releases come, just so long as they come, and they're done right.) The previous release was IMO probably the first which could be appreciated by non-geek types as being something resembling the kind of software they're used to using. Let's hope M13 is even more so. an
2. Don't forget, kids, not only to use Moz from home, but be sure to follow your kindly old Uncle Zontar's example and install it on your machine(s) at work as well... Let the PHB's see you using it... Let it be known to them that you regard it as something to be taken seriously, and that it's not just some toy. Thank you.
3. Slightly offtopic: Why does M12 support my scroll wheel under Win98 but not 95? Both are MS Intellimöuser both using the v 3.0 drivers.
I like Java just fine, what I know of it, and I'm not overly fond of MS. But this doesn't really seem like that big a deal one way or the other, if what MS says about its being already in compliance with the order is true, does it? It looks like Sun had pretty much already won the fracas over Java... so maybe now they'll loosen up a little with regard to a standards process?
Someone please enlightened this poor confused soul.:)
It's too bad he won't be able to devote himself full-time to Moz, and I hope that he'll continue to participate in whatever capacity his other duties allow. I wish him luck in his new job.
(First post? Nahhh... I doubt it. But it was fun to think about.;)
"Grits" are made of ground corn (that's "maize" to those of you outside North America) boiled to make a nasty sort of steamy, slimy slurry that supposedly passes itself off as a hot breakfast cereal when inundated with butter and salt but which is IMNSHO much better suited to being poured down the pants of and thus providing gratification to certain Anonymous Slashdotters. They (the grits, not the ACs) are consumed mostly in the southeast U.S. I get accused of being a Yankee because I can't stand 'em, myself, preferring oatmeal or reheated leftover pizza to break my fast.
She was also quite hot in Heart of Justice (made for TV -- TNT IIRC -- which I taped and keep around now only because I saw that she was in it, and which basically sucked otherwise). And, yes, she was already obviously destined to be a heartbreaker even in Labyrinth, which would still be one of my favorite movies of all time even if she weren't in it.:)
Anyhow, Bowie's banking thing doesn't really surprise me all that much... He's always been into being on the bleeding edge for its own sake, and when he quits doing so, he'll stop being Bowie (my guess is that he'll be dead by then.)
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't anybody have to take history classes anymore?
The bit about "from the Maas to the Memel" just might conceivably upset the Poles, Lithuanians, and Russians just a tad, considering that they acquired the bits of Germany east of the latter river and west of the Oder in 1945. Note that one of the prerequisites for German reunification was that united Germany was required to renounce for all time any claim whatsoever to those territories. In fact (IIRC) a clause stupulating this was added to the Grundgesetz (Basic Law, i.e. Constitution).
I suppose one could make a case for changing it to "from the Maas to the Oder" but I imagine it would still leave a bitter taste in the mouths of those whose nations were intended to provide Lebensraum in the Nazis' Drang nach Osten.
How about any text editor with a sufficient number of macros?
Why the heck does /. keep posting stories at this site? MozillaQuest's content can be summed up as 1/3 FUD, 1/3 idiocy, and 1/3 plagiarism. At best it can can termed a "wannabe" site, and I'm more inclined simply to label it a travesty.
This story was originally posted at MozillaZine on Thursday. For anybody who visits MozillaZine or who has the Mozilla Sidebar turned on in their /. preferences, this is both a bad joke and stale news. Get with it, /. editors! There's just no excuse for this kind of sloppiness.
Don't give this poseur any more hits! Please!
I hope it's true this time. I am soooo tired of Qwest dragging its sorry butt when I live in between two neighbourhoods that have DSL and I can't get it because "We don't believe that it's the right demographic for expansion into that particular area at this time." That's what they actually told me, believe it or not -- and that's also their rationale for continuing to have crappy phone service -- the lines are so bad here, I can't get more than 14.4 on a 56k modem. Did I mention also that I live less than two miles from the State U. and the local "Technology Corridor"? Blarg.
The MozillaQuest site itself is so badly executed and so sophomoronic in content as to place it beyond the bounds of credibility or even lampoonability. How anyone can come up with "October + ? = 2002" is simply beyond me -- unless they've an ulterior motive. That funny biz with the screenshots and graphs struck me as an amateurish (but still annoying) attempt at disinformation.
.vbs viruses on my Windows boxes).
It's just so fscking sad that anyone would even link to it, much less give it guaranteed traffic by posting a story from it as "news" here.
/. editors, please don't choose articles when you've been smoking crack. You'll just continue to embarass yourselves and waste our time. Thank you.
In the meantime, I plan to continue to ignore MozillaQuest and hope that it'll just go away.
BTW, I'm using Mozilla 0.9.3 exclusively for my email and it kicks butt (and I don't have to worry about
I spent about 4 or 5 years as a radio station news director/reporter/announcer. Strange (and IMNSHO very bad) things happen to information when (a) you're forced to reduce it to 30-second chunks that have nothing to do with logic and (b) every second or third story has to be suffixed with a "hook" terminating in "Details after this..." leading into a commercial break. The distinction between information and entertainment becomes blurred, even for the announcer. Everyone gets hooked on the hooks. Both announcer and audience become locked into a vicious cycle; we turn ourselves into a giant gibbering gaggle of crisis junkies. The content itself ceases to matter.
In the not too distant future, we'll all be going around in our usual routine, except that every 60 or 90 seconds, we'll all stop and wait nervously for 30 seconds, then resume whatever it was that we were doing before. Blarg.
Anyhow, that's one of the reasons I got out of the biz.
Ex-newsman concludes rant... We'll have more, right after this...
(P.S. Sometimes Jon Katz pisses me off. But I say keep him around anyway.)
Zontar The Mindless,
Zontar The Mindless,
Zontar The Mindless,
Zontar The Mindless,
Zontar The Mindless,
Thank you.
Zontar The Mindless,
Then kindly explain this.
Thank you.
Zontar The Mindless,
Zontar The Mindless,
Admittedly, this sort of control over the UI is also one of the driving forces behind Microsoft's integration strategy: the difference is that the Microsoft way means Windows-only, and the XUL way works the same across all supported platforms.
The other nice difference, at least for many Web developers, is that we don't have to code in C or Java anymore -- we can use XML and JavaScript instead.
I hope this helps clear up any confusion caused by the AOL droid's misuse of terminology. :)
Zontar The Mindless,
Lem's wordplay is utterly fantastic -- and Kandel's job of conveying that in English is indescribably awesome. :)
...
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Poul Anderson. In particular I remember reading Trader to the Stars when I was a kid and loving it. Of course, just about anything with his name on the cover is worthwhile.
There's also A. E. van Vogt: Slan, The Players of Null-A, The Darkness on Diamondia, and The War Against the Rull. (The Rull are really, REALLY scary when you think about them... ST 20|IN 20 [telepathic]|WI 25 [collective entity]|DX 25 [8 appendages IIRC]|CO 20|CH -5 [coercive abilities + pure ugliness] ... up to 6 attacks/round, +2 to hit, damagewise they can rip the meat off your body bare-handed -- er, tentacled.)
Other faves:
Zontar The Mindless,
At any rate, I stand corrected. In my favor, I can say that I started wondering about it, went and read the release notes in full, then wandered back in here to eat a little crow. Thanks for setting me straight. :)
(Posted with M13/Win95.)
Zontar The Mindless,
Using it to post this, even.
Above offered FYI. Thank you.
Zontar The Mindless,
2. Don't forget, kids, not only to use Moz from home, but be sure to follow your kindly old Uncle Zontar's example and install it on your machine(s) at work as well... Let the PHB's see you using it... Let it be known to them that you regard it as something to be taken seriously, and that it's not just some toy. Thank you.
3. Slightly offtopic: Why does M12 support my scroll wheel under Win98 but not 95? Both are MS Intellimöuser both using the v 3.0 drivers.
Using M12 to post while I download M13... :)
Zontar The Mindless,
Someone please enlightened this poor confused soul. :)
Zontar The Mindless,
by Anonymous Coward on 13:16 16th January, 2000 EST (#5)
steve case can
And what outstanding example of moderatorhood is responsible for this?
Zontar The Mindless,
(First post? Nahhh... I doubt it. But it was fun to think about. ;)
Zontar The Mindless,
"And now you know... the rest of the story." :^p
Zontar The Mindless,
She was also quite hot in Heart of Justice (made for TV -- TNT IIRC -- which I taped and keep around now only because I saw that she was in it, and which basically sucked otherwise). And, yes, she was already obviously destined to be a heartbreaker even in Labyrinth, which would still be one of my favorite movies of all time even if she weren't in it. :)
Anyhow, Bowie's banking thing doesn't really surprise me all that much... He's always been into being on the bleeding edge for its own sake, and when he quits doing so, he'll stop being Bowie (my guess is that he'll be dead by then.)
Zontar The Mindless,
Zontar The Mindless,