Comment Ohhh (Score 2) 86
I feel like my response is supposed to be "Ohh! That's what it would look like if it were different!"
But the reality is that I didn't have much of an idea of what it looks like now.
I feel like my response is supposed to be "Ohh! That's what it would look like if it were different!"
But the reality is that I didn't have much of an idea of what it looks like now.
I really would like to see this same setup in asm.js to see how it compares.
Why does everyone assume that Google is the only game in town for funding Firefox?
Firefox has 1 out of 5 users on the internet. If Google lost Firefox it would be significant. They really wouldn't want to lose it.
Microsoft would love to have Firefox's default search area (and love taking it from Google) and they've repeatedly demonstrated their ability and desire to throw gobs of money at a product until it succeeds (or clearly fails beyond redemption) - and Bing is one of those products.
It seems like few people made the connection when Microsoft partnered with Mozilla to release a version of Firefox "powered by Bing search". Just a month or so later Mozilla announced their three year, $900 million search deal with Google. It seems clear that Mozilla either just before, or during, negotiations with Google demonstrated their ability to pull the trigger with Microsoft.
Google does not want to lose Firefox, but further would hate to lose it to MS. Either way, even if they did, Mozilla would not go hungry.
And when they al start failing at the same time with the same fault, and you lose your 3rd drive in your 8 drive raid 6 in a few hours?
Best start praying to the god of whatever alternate dimension you've stepped into because someone just handed the laws of probability an anvil.
Eich often does a good job of intelligently addressing questions in the comments. I strongly encourage looking through them to learn more.
In reply to one question about the binaries he replied:
...because the BSD-licensed source code is available at http://www.openh264.org/, you and others can verify the compiled bits come from that source, no malware or spyware added. We will organize community auditing of this sanity check, and the binary modules will be cryptographically signed so Firefox can verify their integrity.
And another,
great question, and it applies to Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers. But in the case of Firefox for Linux at least, and for Cisco’s OpenH264 binary modules, we can audit: get matching revision of the open source, compile with the same (bootstrapped from open source) clang or gcc toolchain, and compare bits.
It appears we can have a good amount of confidence that what's in the code is what's in the binary.
I'm curious how they will handle the driver situation in Android.
As I understand it the specific drivers for your device's hardware are package (compiled?) with the OS, making it infeasible to swap out parts.
Perhaps drivers could be stored in updatable firmware on the modules?
No, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating".
Oh crap, then what's this pile of brown stuff in front of me?
I checked the site and I think this bears repeating: The tuner in question is approaching a quarter of a million dollars in costs (perhaps more depending on the '+' part of '30+').
At that rate, wouldn't it be more economical to pay a hacker to build/design one based on MythTV that pulls off the same features (then whip out another or upgrade when you need it)? Heck, you could hire a couple MythTV developers.
I think it's a good time for us all to take a step back and reflect on the (many very reactionary) comments made after the "Google breaks Chromecast" story the other day.
Persona has been designed to be fully decentralized. Mozilla plans to be removed from the equation. So that should really help to up the anonymizability (suck it spell check!) of the system.
This *isn't* a part of the core. Nothing is shipping with the browser, it must be installed.
It's an API, just like the addons APIs, except addons can see what page you're on, and what links you click, and your history, etc, etc. This API is significantly more restricted (and that's a good thing). The only way for Facebook (or anyone else) to see what page you're on is if you share it to them - which is kinda the point anyway. Its "surface area" to affect the browser is much more limited than addons.
I'd much rather have my friends & relatives using Facebook's version of this than an addon equivalent.
We complain about how all the "sheeple" keep voting the idiots into power and then doing nothing as their freedoms erode, but if ignorance is a significant part of the problem, what are we doing to fix it?
I don't always have the time or eloquence to lay out a compelling narrative with an overwhelming mountain of evidence to persuade my friends and relatives - and frankly, my memory sucks. So I'm wondering, is there compelling, noninflammatory collection of facts that I can point people to?
The media isn't telling the story, so that leaves it to us.
Since you seemed to have a potentially genuine question in there, I'll give it a shot.
Firefox has three 6 week long prerelease phases before a final release (Nightly, Aurora & Beta). Nightly is reserved for larger changes and then subsequent phases have increasing restrictions for code landings (always getting more strict before moving to the next phase). Each phase, of course, has an increasing number of users, with Beta having the most.
This way most of the code that's changed gets between 12 and 18 weeks of testing.
Mozilla has thousands of automated tests they run daily looking for stability, correctness, etc (and of course security reviews).
Chrome uses this same basic model.
Oh, I just saw you said "a schedule like this" referring to the new Firefox OS schedule. That would mean that the final releases will have been in testing for 30-36 weeks.
This does not seem "run and gun" to me.
Your math would check out if you had your details right.
Firefox cuts a release every six weeks (not four). So a FFOS feature release would correspond with *every other* Firefox version (not every third).
Mozilla keeps backing up and making their release plans more like the old
In what ways have you seen this?
No need to turn it around, we can have both.
But if it turns out the cure is worse than the cause, these are good questions to answer.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.