Don’t even bother to read my post on Firefox 3.0, go read Andy’s post from the Chicago Sun-Times. Hell, go bookmark Andy’s column index over there, he’s a better writer then I’ll ever be (and certainly dig out out his blog from teh sidebar on the right). Worth a read if only for the last 3 paragraphs, which sum up much of tech writing and all the hype on Firefox.
Archive for the 'Software' Category
UPDATED: Mozilla’s sites are being hammered, use this direct link to download. And Furbism has some optimized builds up already! No, I do not and will not provide links to Windows optimized builds (don’t know or care if they exist). Added mini review.
UPDATED: Firefox 3 has surpassed Internet Explorer 3.0’s download record of 1.5 million over 24 hours in august of 1996! 1.9 million already and the day is still young! Follow the numbers here.
UPDATED: Techcrunch reports Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8.3 million times in it’s first twenty four hours.
According to Mozilla Foundation CEO John Lilly, that gives Firefox 3 a four percent market share of browsers worldwide straight out of the gate. Mozilla’s servers sent out 83 terabytes of data during that time, and at the peak there were 17,000 downloads per second (with an average of 4,000 per second).
Ok, I’ll spare you hype. Suffice it to say that manana, the 17th of June 2008 is the release date of the freeware Open Source webrowser, Firefox 3.0. And the Mozilla foundation, developers of Firefox would like you to help set a world record for software by getting your free copy. If you’re on Linux, Mac OS X, or even Windows you should get it. For Windows users it provides a faster, more secure and more extensible browser, for the other operating systems it gives you the extensibility and choice-you might find you like it better then your default system browser. Get Firefox here.
I realize not everyone is as browser nerdy as me. I usually have 5+ browsers installed: Opera, Safari, Firefox, Camino, Webkit nightly builds and Firefox nightly builds. But you should have one browser set up as default with cookies turned off, and another one with cookies on (no third party) that you only use for your secure browsing (like banking, bloging, or any website with your billing info).
For the nerdly like me who use the links in my sidebar for browsers optimized for specific processors, you might want to wait a few days for the optimizers to recompile. Optimized browsers tend to be faster and less memory intensive, so us laptop lovers can have more tabs open. And yes, this post was written in Firefox 3.0 release candidate 3, PowerPC 7450 optimized which runs best on my loaner laptop.
MINI REVIEW. New look, blends better with whatever OS your running, can now search your bookmarks (and history) through the addressbar, smaller memory footprint, no more memory leaks, new privacy and security features, better and more standards complient rendering, Faster!
UPDATED: Frank (@comcastcares on Twitter) is on this this week’s TWIT podcast for a few minutes explaining what you can really expect from Comcrap’s boost technology. Leo’s going to bring him back for more explanations. Frank’s job at Comcast is to monitor social media and help- so use him. After he left the podcast to take care of his baby, they covered a story that the Max Planck Institute in Germany has proven that Comcast (among others) is still blocking peer to peer despite their statements to the contrary.
A Comcast employee on Twitter asked. So I’ll answer. You can’t can’t do anything. I don’t doubt your sincerity, you may in fact be the only honest person in your company. Your company needs to change.
Corporate culture doesn’t start at the bottom, it’s starts at the top When your leaders are greedy scum, it filters down. Greedy rapacious boards and management make scummy business decisions. They hire scum, although every now and again a good person sneaks in. In Comcast’s case, they prefer to hire contractors, who hire subcontractors. No insurance for the workers, and plausible deniability for management.
So start by replacing the current board and firing all management from assistant VP up (unless that applies to Frank). Hell, I’d cut all management salaries too.
Acknowledge you lied. All the lies, all the lies your contractors told, all the ones you told Congress. Even the ones you haven’t been caught on 
And stop doing the things you lied about.
Apologize for lying.
As an act of contrition, hire all those subcontractors. Unionize. Retrain them. Invest in infrastructure, like fiber or wimax or 700 spectrum, anything to get you away from the current one person on the cable loop eats all the bandwidth-because that will cut down on this (read it all the to the bottom and follow the link).
Stop flooding our mailboxes with junk mail. Plant some damn trees.
That’s a start.
(Part of my antipathy towards Comcast comes from dealing with them on behalf of my elderly parents. I spent hours every month on the phone. Hours after their contract finally ran out I switched them to AT&T-and I can’t tell you how much I hate dealing with those people. But so far, I’ve spent less then 8 hours in total dealing with AT&T.)
BTW, if you’re on Twitter and are having problems with Comcast, Tweet Comcastcares. John C. Dvorak even likes him 
I had been using Plaxo as my online backup address book and contact manager. Then they sold themselves to Comcast today. I’ve spent months of my life on the phone with those idiots straightening out my parents account with them, until their contract ran out. Comcast’s craptacular billing and customer service is just part of their problem: lying is part part of their corporate culture. Not just to you and me, not just in ads, but to Congress. Screw them, they lie about service, they lie about blocking ports, they lie about your bill. I do not trust them with any of my data. If you use Plaxo, delte your account NOW, before Comcast has a chance to change the terms and conditions-right now Plaxo removes any and all traces or your data form their servers.
Obviously if you use Plaxo’s syncing tools, sync one last time. Then back up your data locally, and remove their syncing software. Then remove your Plaxo account-you can use this link to delete you account. (Thanks to Leo Laporte for the link!)
Before Halo 1, 2 and 3.
Before Oni. Before Myth.
There Was Marathon, the legendary first person shooter game for the Macintosh. FPS are games like Doom, Quake and Halo where you run around and shoot things, playing from a first person perspective. I don’t know if it ws the first FPS for the Mac, but it and it’s sequels were the best. And it put to sleep once and for all the old notion that Macs weren’t for gaming. Game play was great, the story was great, and it looked great. And it had multiperson online play.It was from Bungie, a small Chicago software company located in the Pilsen neighborhood, in an old church building on Halsted. Eventually they got fed up with their landlord never fixing the flakey building power and moved into the loop. This was right after they released Myth, a great take on real time 3d strategy games (kind of too real time for me, I couldn’t manage all the characters, gameplay was really intense). Shortly thereafter they were bought by Microsoft (Bungie’s version of this story starts here, with the parts I’ve covered here (the dilapidated Pod building on Halsted), here (Marathon), here (Myth, more on the Pod space) and here (the M$ buyout)).
Jump ahead ten years, and M$ has spun Bungie off. And Marathon is now open source and available for the Mac, Linux and windows. Get it here or if your on OS X, get a simplified one part download here thanks to Macbreak Weekly podcast, using password “macbreak”. Alex Lindsey from Macbreak Weekly and Pixel Corp is setting up a Marathon online tournament game Monday, for more info listen tot he end of this MBW podcast (you should listen anyway, it’s one of the funniest podcasts they’ve done, it includes Andy Ihnatko and Merlin Mann parodying unix geeks talking tech) Alex also put up a screencast on how to set up Marathon, it’s a little complicated.
(Dissclaimer: I didn’t own Marathon back in the day-I didn’t have a Mac that would run it till I came into a Mac II FX back in the late 90s, and my copy of Myth was given to me by the marketing guy at Bungie right before they moved to the loop)
So I’m still borrowing and begging computers to get online.
They’re all PCs running Windows.
They all suck. You should never see your computer re-render the screen. You should never see your computer missrender a portion of your screen. No should your computer force you to reboot to get back online. When a Mac does any of that, it’s a sure sign that Something Very Bad has happened, something that will involve you having to fix your Mac.
With Windows it’s an hourly event.
As bad as Leopard is, I’ve slighted it by comparing it to Vista. Vista is like bathing in fecal matter. Leopard’s annoyances are only because of the high standards set by Tiger (and yes, even Tiger had room for improvement).
The big problems for both operating systems are trying to build on top of an already bloated and creaky codebase. Apple would be wise to listen to it’s developers in this regard. There’s a lot of stuff under the hood that needs fixing. Microsoft ofcourse has listened to it’s users, and felt their pain. That’s why they’re buying Yahoo and moving into advertising. Even they don’t want to use their own software anymore.
OH CRAP.
quickly, we need a replacement for de.licio.us, Flickr, and all the other things they’ve bought up…
This is amazingly good news. The Two best feed readers in the world, FeedDemon for Windows and the awesome NetNewsWire for OS X are now free, as in no charge. I’ve been a fan of NNW since it’s beta release, i’ve been using the Lite version for years. I just downloaded the full featured goodness. They’ve also freed up their iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and HTML Mobile products. And yes, you can turn of syncing. Try them, RSS readers shave time out of your daily blog reading and news gathering. And your blog posting and social bookmarking.
Any Operating System update that forces me to change my current workflow against my wishes, BECAUSE IT IS INCAPABLE OF PERFORMING THE ACTIONS THE PREVIOUS VERSION WAS CAPABLE OF IS A FAILURE. Even if the workflow just involved keeping 60 tabs open in Firefox. likewise if it forces me to turn off features that have been there since day one. Or not use some/any/all the new features for fear of bogging/crashing my machine. Extra special failure points for random irreproducible system lock ups without the spinning beach ball of doom and random miss-writing of the screen (honestly, that’s something that hasn’t happened to me since i quit using Windows 98).
Curse them, they finally released Final Cut Express 4, and they lowered the price to $199, finally with upgrade pricing for all previous versions of $99. About time. Looks like they added a bunch of new FX and Livetype.
