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Comment Re:Mozilla doesn't build hardware (Score 3, Interesting) 89

Your attempt to confuse here isn't really helpful.

Google does *sell* Google Glass and Nexus phones and tablets and Chromecast and Nest and soon Dropcams and probably more. They are "Google products" branded and sold by Google as theirs.

Mozilla only has one device that it works on directly, the Firefox OS Flame reference phone. The rest of the hardware you see out there is being made and sold by someone else.

And that's not just true of the hardware. Much of the work going on to extend Firefox OS software into areas outside of phones is being done by third parties for their products.

Comment Mozilla doesn't build hardware (Score 4, Informative) 89

Mozilla doesn't build hardware. We make software, including Firefox OS. Firefox OS is a completely open platform freely available for any company to build on top of without restriction. There are dozens of companies building Firefox OS-based products today and there will be more tomorrow, covering mobile phones, tablets, TVs, set top boxes, game consoles, streaming dongles, wearables, and more. Some of those companies are working directly with Mozilla and others are taking the code and running with it on their own.

Comment This is news? (Score 3, Insightful) 44

My first reaction was "Um.. Duh?"

I learned this in middle school, I believe. The Hawaiian Islands are a chain that's formed by the movement of the Pacific Plate across a hot spot. As it passes over, a volcano builds up and builds up, eventually forming an island that keeps growing as long as the vent stays over the hot spot. Eventually, it will move on and start eroding, while another volcano starts up at the ocean floor. All of the Hawaiian Islands except for Hawai'i (The Big Island) are currently shrinking, while Hawai'i is still growing. If you look at charts of the Pacific Ocean's floor, you can see a long chain going all the way to the subduction zone at the Aleutian Trench.

Comment Mozilla is not a public company (Score 1) 564

Mozilla is not a public company. It is a 501C3 tax exempt non profit and its wholly owned taxable subsidiary. Our stockholders are the people of the world. Our decisions are based on maximizing the value of the Internet for the benefit of everyone everywhere, especially those who lack representation from the giant institutional multinational publicly traded corporations like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Comment Re:0.19 (Score 1) 140

yeah. the name is juvenile. just like windows. i mean - how will i find that on altavista? and macintosh. i mean it'll just hide among all the apple varieties of the same name. or what about android? all i'll find is robot porn instead. oh and a galaxy note... note.. gee - i won't find anything outside of a bunch of pictures of paper. or a galaxy gear.. i'll just find cogs all over.

you really know nothing about naming. names evoke ideas and concepts in someones head. a name is inspirational to most. the easier it is to remember (eg is a word they already know) the more easily they attach to it. if they have to remember "xfwm" or "ctwm" ... they will have a far harder time remembering it. "someone told me about this awesome window manager last weekend called f something... bunch of nonsensical letters" but if it's enlightenment.. they remember as the word itself is a unit of knowledge where fvwm is 4 units of knowledge. the word enlightenment will likely be associated with a concept or images, but twm will not.

seemingly a vast swathe of professionals in marketing agree on naming this way in the past, and still do. just SOME examples above.

but who am i kidding. this is slashdot. actual facts cited are irrelevant. trolling with an exaggerated personal opinion is the order of the day.

Comment We're fixing this (Score 4, Informative) 333

Firefox OS is trying to fix much of this.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firef...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
The Web is the most successful platform of all time and we're leading the pack on bringing a the Web platform to mobile in a way that's integrated rather than fractured like the existing app store models.

Comment Re:Slashdot back to its roots (Score 3, Interesting) 89

i don't remember pulling my rant... ? i'm very much in a habit of "what's done is done". i stick by my words. even to this day.

and yes - i agree. lost my way in hooking up with gnome. i did this because redhat asked me to. it was my job. what i didn't know is that enlightenment and gnome were total polar opposites in goals and design. the hookup was a result of a year+ saying "you need a wm for a desktop" and miguel saying "we don't need no wm for gnome. we can do everything without" and at the end of the year there being a "holy shit. we need a wm now!" and i was the person who could most easily deliver the things needed. so i did. it was my job.

but that process kind of required selling my soul to do so. gnome wanted a wm that dumbly emulated windows 95/98 as closely as possible, would give up all of its extra bits (desktop menus, pagers, wallpaper handling, etc. etc.) and hand over most of its soul and features to gnome and be as bland as possible. metacity was a much better fit for gnome. enlightenment wasn't. the majority of e as disabled for gnome. they just don't fit together. end of story. the idea that you can do a full desktop and not integrate a wm that does just what you need/want was the problem to begin with.

either way - after the divorce, e got e16 out and we started big bang planning for the future, imlib2 (much better imaging support), and then even started messing with opengl to render accelerated graphics with all the fanciness with imlib2 as fallback... and yes - the dot com bubble crashed and everyone - me included had to run for the hills and make a living and we lost a lot of time we used to have... it was some evenings and a weekend then. thus the slowdown. lots of big plans were underway and i was not in the mood for screwing with the plans and work.

these days that work has come to fruition. evas does all the opengl acceleration and has software backed rendering. both are fast. the compositor can use either. it does a lot more besides. e is modular yet a single unified process much like the kernel. we have even widget sets and a full ball of toolkit under it all. it took a while, bet we got there. and now we're reaping the benefits of the work and moving forward. thus e19. :)

Comment Re:There used to be a buzz (Score 2) 89

that's what we're trying. have the core desktop. all the things you need to make your machine and world function. it's missing bits still and a lot of what is there could be polished more, but the goal is to give you just what you were after as above. any applications after that are optional extras.

Comment Re:Good for E! (Score 1) 89

git master. if there is a problem... mention it and it gets fixed really fast as long as you find a dev awake and listening on irc. things like:

  hey - if i do x, y and z i get crash blah. here's the backtrace dump e put in ~/.e-crashdump.txt
  hmmm wtf? ... 30 seconds pass
  fix in git. update. :)

Comment Re:Good for E! (Score 3, Insightful) 89

options are not for e- but for things like.. you are building an embedded device and you don't use gl.. but you want to cut down a few hundred kb of ram, so using xcb vs xlib is what you want. you can do that, BUT the xcb back-end is 99% complete and you still need xlib if you plan to use opengl due to the binary apis demanding an xlib display handle. you have to have an option. it's not for the wm - it's for the toolkit and special cases. there re lots of such special cases for special purposes. the problem is some smart-butt user thinks it's a great idea to fiddle with every option there with a "ooh i hear xcb is faster" (which is basically is not), and then discovered their fglrx or radeon drivers don't like xcb as the primary display connection and then things crash/hang/don't work... or something like that. this is not the DEFAULT config - it's an option, but it's turned on by people who want to tweak everything - even for packages. it's not bloat - it's features that can be switched for different back-ends, dependencies REMOVED and so on. you really should study up before making assumptions.

Comment Re:font hinting & antialiasing (Score 2) 89

that won't help with e or efl. all fonts are drawn the same way. it only affects look. fyi we use efl and e on phones... and not even the mid range ones. talking 200-300mhz things from way back... my standard low-end test box for x86 is a pentium-m@600mhz with 512m ram, no gpu accel at all. e runs decently on that even with software compositing. it's not silky smooth, but it good enough. and as i said.. changing the font mode won't help e - the font glyph is stored as a greymap and renders the same way regardless... but we do care. efl 1.9 now has font compression. we realtime compress fonts with 4bit packed or 4bit RLE if big enough and decompress on the fly - saves memory bandiwdth... and thus gets you speed AND saves memory.

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