03 Apr 2003
The Phoenix Rises

Phoenix rises from Mozilla's ashes. Three months after Apple Computer bypassed it for a smaller, faster Web browser, Mozilla.org refocuses its coding efforts on a smaller, faster version of its own product. [CNET News.com]

Well, isn't this grand news? I've just transitioned all my machines to Mozilla, got my mail and web clients all set up with various addons in XUL and now they decide to redirect the project to some "lightweight" varient. I guess my anger will be proportional to the degree to which this new direction maintains the diea of plugins and addons, but still... I mean ....

Good grief: I'm 46 years old and no lightweight! Is this not just "fat fear" in disguise? It's not like RAM, processor power or hard drives were rare and precious by the byte and cycle, as they have been in the not too distant past.

And all because Apple based Safari on KHTML? Plezzzze - Konqueror failed me utterly and completely once upon a time (in KDE 2x) and I was not happy. Safari itself seems to be somewhat better, but I still use Mozilla on the Mac and the wife, after seriously trying to use Safari for a few days, went back to IE.

The Gecko engine has it's occassional glitches, but it doesn't transmit virii like IE or Outlook. And it runs the same on Mac, Linux and Windoze - gimme a break! It's quite a piece of work.

I guess if they can maintain backward compatability with the "general direction" of Mozilla development, towards XUL (which the article implies - alledgedly it's XPFE being abandoned) then perhaps it'll work out in the long run. It just upsets me when I see this happening to something that isn't really (from a users standpoint) broken.

Curiously, I use all of Mozilla except the IRC client, and have found it, performance wise, to be equal or better than IE/Outlook. Tabbed browsing is great, as are the addons that let me spoof my browser ID (some idiot bank I use required IE - so I spoofed it and it worked just fine with Mozilla).

The lack of "useless" features in Phoenix concerns me as well - as a programmer, I've learned not to try to second guess the end user as to what's useful or not. Alot of my stuff has ended up being used in some very unique and creative ways because I built some "useless" and usually undocumented feature into the code.

I suppose I'd better go get a copy of this thing and take a look/see. Sigh. As if I don't have anything better to do.

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Secret, Public Experiments

Wired reports that an "agriculture researcher" wants a break. Apparently this chap, in order to protect his creations from attacks by vandals, wants to keep their location secret. Please, give me a break ...

First off, a person in a lab extracting DNA from one species and placing it into another is not an "agriculture researcher". At best he's a medical scientist, at worst, a modern day Frankenstein. But that's just me quibbling about words, and letting my bias show.

Secondly, despite my extreme distrust of and distaste for genetic modification, attacking the persons of property involved, like the loonies from some organizations are wont to do, is wrong and in fact, somewhat dangerous. Last time I checked, all 50 states had laws on the books covering vandalism. If some idiot burns down your lab, you have legal (civil and criminal) recourse against them.

But hiding the location in order to "prevent" vandalism is a logical fallacy. It might decrease the incidence of vandalism against the "research", but what about the potential vandalism (wanton or negligent destruction of property) caused by the "research".

Suppose one of these "experiments" get's loose in my pasture, 'cause my neighbor has a whole field of them and I don't tknow about it (wouldn't want his fields burned, now would he?). Let's say this mod puts a weed killer into common grasses .... my sheep eat the grass. Let's even take the best case here: they don't get sick. But when they go to slaughter, I lose my organic certification!

I would have no idea how or why, at this point. I'd probably have to drop some thousand(s) of dollars trying to find out. And for those of you who are unaware of it, an organic certification is not cheap.

Properly considered, this is "vandalism", or at the very least negligence. But how am I to recover my losses if I'm prevented legally from discovering their cause?

Secrecy in government is generally a bad idea - sometimes necessary, but always carrying a potential for abuse. Secrecy in research like this is potentially lethal, if not to my flocks or crops, at least to my livelihood.

Guard your experiments if you want to prevent attacks on them, but don't hide them in my back yard without my knowledge or consent.

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link