Comment Re:my wife (Score 1) 411
Was a Flux Capacitor part of the dowry?
Comment Try 1999 (Score 1) 363
I was using M-builds in late 1999 that were reasonably reliable. Many nightlies leading up to 1.0 were usable enough that I was installing them for the computer-clueless that I supported at that time. Just had to find a good one and test it first.
I'm not a fanboy of where Mozilla and its products have evolved, but I see nothing that compels me to change. I would never think of switching to Apple's Mail, for example, refused to use it when I worked for them (which is why I was often the only person that could open attachments). I like that it is simple and doesn't help me too much. The 2.0 builds are working pretty well right now, although the extensions are lagging.
Agree that development and adoption of Firefox took a long time and that IE 6's legacy on the internet resembles W's on the world at large.
I'm not a fanboy of where Mozilla and its products have evolved, but I see nothing that compels me to change. I would never think of switching to Apple's Mail, for example, refused to use it when I worked for them (which is why I was often the only person that could open attachments). I like that it is simple and doesn't help me too much. The 2.0 builds are working pretty well right now, although the extensions are lagging.
Agree that development and adoption of Firefox took a long time and that IE 6's legacy on the internet resembles W's on the world at large.
Comment So... (Score 4, Insightful) 532
Ceci n'est pas une pipe?
Comment Spam Karma (Score 1) 183
I use Spam Karma and Bad Behavior on my not-very-popular Wordpress blog and have no spam comments at all, and I used to have lots of them. SK has recently been abandoned by its founder, but still works on WP 2.7.
Comment Goodbye Postdata warning! (Score 1) 604
The end of the Soviet browser era is coming. May all the cool plugins be portable to Chrome.
Geoffrey Perkins Is Dead At 55 108
Dynamoo writes "Legendary comedy writer and producer Geoffrey Perkins has died in a road accident in London. Perkins was until recently the head of comedy for BBC TV. Earlier in his career he produced the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series, and was a writer, director, and producer of many comedy shows including Spitting Image, The Fast Show, and several others. He also invented the game of Mornington Crescent. The world will be a less joyful place without him."
Nonprofit Group Sends Filesharing Propaganda To Students 266
palegray.net writes "The National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit organization, has sent file-sharing propaganda to thousands of students. The supposedly 'educational' materials, presented in the form of a comic strip, are intended to frighten students with gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more). From the article: '"The Case of Internet Piracy," however, reads like the Recording Industry Association of America's public relations playbook: Download some songs, go to jail and lose your scholarship. Along the way, musicians will file onto the bread lines. "The purpose is basically to educate kids — middle school and high school-aged about how the justice system operates and about what really goes on in the courtroom as opposed to what you see on television," said Lorri Montgomery, the center's communications director.' I'm not encouraging anyone to break any laws, but this is ridiculous. What's truly discouraging is the fact that several judges appear to be in full support of this sort of 'education.'
The propaganda material is available in PDF form, and it lists the judges and others involved in its creation. Wired's post has a summary of the story (which is good, since the story is awful), and Techdirt notes a couple of the legal inaccuracies.
Software Update Shuts Down Nuclear Power Plant 355
Garabito writes "Hatch Nuclear Power Plant near Baxley, Georgia was forced into a 48-hour emergency shutdown when a computer on the plant's business network was rebooted after an engineer installed a software update. The Washington Post reports, 'The computer in question was used to monitor chemical and diagnostic data from one of the facility's primary control systems, and the software update was designed to synchronize data on both systems. According to a report filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when the updated computer rebooted, it reset the data on the control system, causing safety systems to errantly interpret the lack of data as a drop in water reservoirs that cool the plant's radioactive nuclear fuel rods. As a result, automated safety systems at the plant triggered a shutdown.' Personally, I don't think letting devices on a critical control system accept data values from the business network is a good idea."
Microsoft Linking Silverlight, Ruby on Rails 232
CWmike writes "Friday Microsoft will demonstrate integration between its new Silverlight browser plug-in and Ruby on Rails. Microsoft's John Lam, a program manager in the dynamic language runtime team, said in a recent blog item: 'Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn't a more real Ruby program than Rails.' Also at the event, Microsoft officials will demonstrate IronRuby, a version of the Ruby programming language for Microsoft's .Net platform, running a Ruby on Rails application."
Adobe Puts Free Photoshop Online 376
Amit Agarwal writes "Adobe today launched a basic version of Adobe Photoshop available for free online. Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. According to Yahoo! News, Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that's in the works."
US House Rejects Telecom Amnesty 614
The US House has just approved a new bill that rejects the retroactive immunity to telecommunication businesses and denies most of the new powers for the US President to spy on citizens without a warrant. "As impressive as the House vote itself was, more impressive still was the floor debate which preceded it. I can't recall ever watching a debate on the floor of either House of Congress that I found even remotely impressive -- until today. One Democrat after the next -- of all stripes -- delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law, oversight on presidential eavesdropping, and safeguards on government spying. They swatted away the GOP's fear-mongering claims with the dismissive contempt such tactics deserve, rejecting the principle that has predominated political debate in this country since 9/11: that the threat of the Terrorists means we must live under the rule of an omnipotent President and a dismantled constitutional framework."
House of Representatives To Discuss Wiretapping In Closed Session 264
Nimey brings word that for the first time in 25 years, the US House of Representatives will use a closed-door session to discuss proposed wiretapping legislation. The old legislation expired last month when government officials could not agree on retroactive immunity for the telecommunications providers who assisted with the wiretaps. The most recent version of the bill, proposed by House democrats, does not include telecom immunity. Because of that, President Bush has stated his willingness to veto the bill. The Yahoo article notes, "The closed-door debate was scheduled for late Thursday night, after the House chamber could be cleared and swept by security personnel to make sure there are no listening devices."
Switchgrass Makes Better Ethanol Than Corn 560
statemachine writes to mention that the USDA and farmers took part in a 5-year study of switchgrass, a grass native to North America. The study found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver around 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can only yield around 24 percent. "But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to deliver the yields necessary to help ethanol become a viable alternative to petroleum-derived gasoline, Vogel argues. 'To really maximize their yield potential, you need to provide nitrogen fertilization,' he says, as well as improved breeding techniques and genetic strains. 'Low input systems are just not going to be able to get the energy per acre needed to provide feed, fuel and fiber.'"
Is There Such a Thing As Absolute Hot? 388
AlpineR writes "Is there an opposite to absolute zero? An article from PBS's NOVA online explains several theories of the maximum possible temperature. Maybe it's the Planck temperature, 10^32 K, beyond which the known laws of physics break down. Or maybe just 10^30 K, the limit of some versions of string theory. If space is actually 11-dimensional then the maximum temperature could even be as low as 10^17 K, attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. Or maybe infinite temperature wraps around to negative temperature and absolute hot is the same as absolute cold."
Submission + - RMS Talks about Binary Drivers and Open Source
An anonymous reader writes: Newsforge has an article about a talk RMS recently gave to students at UCSD. RMS fielded a number of interesting questions relevant to the future of the free software movement including, "Do you support the Creative Commons license?" and "Can I use ATI and NVIDIA drivers because Mesa isn't nearly as complete?". Can we expect Linux ever to see main stream adoption with these persistent driver and licensing issues still hanging around?
