Ziggy

Because you're whining about it. Yes, it's a fact that Firefox will eventually get hit with viruses, malware, etc. But internal coding practices almost completely prevent anything from maliciously happening unexpededly. I say almost because there's bound to be a bug somewhere. But there's a 99.995% chance there won't be any unexpected Software Installations without the dialog. It's called drive-by downloading. Firefox shouldn't be vulnerable to any of this (but IE is, in many different ways [Windows Media Player license download bug is one of them...). It should not be possible for a program to maliciously become installed in Firefox via a bug in the software. Sure, it will happen. But if you knew the inner workings of Firefox, you'd know that it'd have to happen outside of the browser (with allowance for a few bugs that allow something to happen inside it, but that's VERY unlikely). IE isn't open source, so they can't find exploits in the code... Although I'm not disagreeing with you (someone will eventually drill the lock on the safe), it's blown WAY out of proportion. Here's why: MSIE is a shell for Trident, the MSHTML rendering engine. The Windows operating system also uses Trident. If there's just one piece of code out of place, a web page can get full access to Windows. Compare this to Firefox (and even Firefox 2.0, which will probably use the Gecko Runtime Environment or Gecko Rendering Service): Firefox is a user-level application using Mozilla Gecko. Blocks prevent Firefox from parsing Cross-Platform Install (XPI) files unless you allow it. Even if a page did manage to defeat these blocks (and in theory they can't, because there is no way around that dialog), they'd only get access to what your user can access, and if you secure your system properly, you should be running as a limited user or guest, so that shouldn't be anything more than personal files -- NOT the entire operating system. Even if there were two "holy shit" bugs in Firefox for every "holy shit" IE bug, the bugs would be far less severe than IE ones because IE is tied very closely to the OS. And as of last month, my Windows drive has the user "Keith Gable" as a limited user. And my Linux drive (default boot) has always had me as a limited user. So the "well, why don't you try that" excuse won't work. (OT: Windows BSODs now because of a mobo upgrade; Linux didn't even require a kernel reinstall)

Cleric, you understand what I mean . Maxathon understands the concept behind minor and major version number changes . And Maxathon is really the only MSIE-based browser I'd ever feel like touching. Even though I'm fairly content with Firefox (okay, I wouldn't change a thing), if I had a choice between Maxathon and MSIE, I'd pick Maxathon. Or Maxathon and Netscape (I hate Netscape).

Dude, I'm not a "bit stuck up for a kid". You are not a developer. I am. So I feel that I am well within my right to critique the version number of IE 7.0. Microsoft has SAID THEMSELVES that they aren't planning on adding many new features to it -- they only plan on making it more secure. Which is fine, and I'm glad they're taking some initiative. But I don't see where you get off trying to tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about when you obviously have no clue what you're talking about. MSIE will be a minor security upgrade, not a major feature upgrade. IE7 isn't going to be any major difference over IE6 other than it'll have more restrictions. And I'm hoping that they'll adopt the Gecko security model in some shape or form. As for dissing Microsoft, I don't. Saying that one operating system is better than another is not dissing the other. Linux is better than Windows. Porsche is better than Ford. I'm not saying that Ford makes shitty cars, I'm saying that Porsche makes better cars than Ford. The same applies for the OS argument. As for Ozzy's comment that "ooh, virus writers and adware makers are attacking Firefox, oh no, it's going to be worse than IE now!": bullshit. I'm subscribed to at least 50 bugs on Bugzilla, most of which involve user-end security. I can read and almost write C/C++. I've seen the code that does the security checks for extension installation. There is absolutely no way for adware to maliciously get installed. There are two ways to install adware in Firefox: 1) the user presses "Install" on the extension installation dialog 2) the adware is an external program and it modifies the Firefox profile (which is in a directory name that is random, so it makes it partially hard). In both cases, it is user error. On Windows, you can format the hard drive on a usermode level. Sure, a program can modify the profile and install itself, but the same program could also format your hard drive, hard reboot your computer, fry your power supply, flash your EEPROM so your BIOS won't work, and short out your video card (since you can, in usermode, adjust the video clock and voltage). Here's an analogy: I can put a padlock on my door. It'll keep people out, but anyone can get in if they have a tool to cut the lock off. I could improve that security by putting a deadbolt on my door. They're much harder to defeat than a simple $1 Wal-Mart padlock, but they can still be defeated. MSIE is the $1 padlock. As with any computer system, Firefox will be getting broken into and there will eventually be users affected (so far, nobody has gotten bitten by any bad Firefox worms). It's inevitable. But, and this is why I choose open source over commercial products, I can be assured that somebody, somewhere, will be able to fix the issue days, hours, or even minutes after it is discovered. Case in point? Ping of death. It took Linus Torvalds twenty three minutes to patch it and release a new version of the kernel (as well as patches to older versions [~3KB]). It took the BSD kernel about 45 minutes. Commercial UNIX vendors had a fix within the week. Microsoft Windows didn't get a fix for THREE MONTHS. The fix ended up being about 45KB. This was also in the day when Windows 98 was new. They didn't have to test the fix on every configuration; all they had to do was recompile the DLL for 95, 98, and NT4 and they were set to go. The problem in the first place was the lack of bounds-checking on ping packets. It allowed a ping packet to fill up more than it's supposed to. The fix for those is a one-liner. Windows is written in the same C that Linux and BSD are written in, so it makes absolutely no sense to me why they would need to take three months to fix the problem. That incident is one of the reasons I don't trust Microsoft. I'm not dissing them, I'm just saying why I don't trust them. And let's not forget the other things, like breaking Windows 3.1 on DR-DOS even though it worked flawlessly, making MS-DOS 5 break Lotus 1-2-3 for no reason, buying OS/2 and then screwing IBM and their customers, the whole "IE can't be uninstalled from 98 first edition" argument (it can, I do it, and it works perfectly [better than usual actually]). Sure, Microsoft makes good products. Exchange is a pretty good communications server (the other commercial ones suck). I would never run it because I can't trust that Microsoft will keep me protected in case I get screwed (whereas with Postfix or Sendmail, if a problem does occur, the patch will be out very quickly and I can apply it myself). Sorry for the rambling, it's just that some people apparently don't get it. IE7 is only going to be a minor update. The version number is a mind game. Open source will always be infinitely more secure than commercial products (open source potentially can use every person on the planet to develop their software and patch bugs; closed source/commercial products only have a couple hundred people). I'm bloody tired of this argument getting brought up. And a little FYI: I like Safari better than Firefox. But I don't own a Mac and have no intention of buying one (32 bit IA-32 games won't run on a 32/64-bit PPC). (I'm writing this in lynx because MSIE is broken on the lab computer at Vo-Tech and I don't have administrator privileges so I can't install Firefox -- but I can run PuTTY and connect to my SSH server and use lynx)

Microsoft said that IE7 is just going to contain improved security. As I said, they might audit the code and see some open control loops and go "whoops" and fix those problems (which would make Internet Explorer suck less), I highly doubt they're going to even touch the rendering portion of IE. Perhaps, but I'm still a better developer than you are. Ever heard of the phrase "don't enter a battle of wits unarmed"? What's new in IE, lets see: IE1: the worst browser IE2: crappy browser IE3: awful browser IE4: introduced "innovative new features" such as ActiveX, Active Content, VBscript, etc. All of the technologies introduced directly compete with Netscape and Sun Java (MS Java was created to compete with Sun Java -- they lost a lawsuit over this recently). Basic CSS1 support. IE4.1: 128 bit encryption IE5: Basic CSS2 support. HTML 4.0 support. IE5.5: Improved SSL, improved CSS1, fix numerous "we're the server authors and you are sucking very badly Microsoft" errors IE6: P3P, full CSS1, privacy controls, improve UI slightly IE6.01 (SP2): popup blocker, information bar. Most of the core rendering hasn't changed since IE4. Sure, they improved CSS1/CSS2, but so did Mozilla, and they jumped from 1.1 to 1.2 to 1.3 and not from 1.1 to 2.0. Their version numbering is an arbitrary number. They should have gone from IE4 to 4.1 to 4.2 (5) to 4.3 (5.5) to 4.4/4.5 (6). Then they wouldn't sound so much like they're lying. Since, like, when the only major differences you can tell between major browser versions is improved support for CSS, chances are they shouldn't have made it a major browser revision. MSIE is the browser that is pre-installed on 98% of all PCs. While I am now recommending Macintoshes and Linux-based computers to all of the people I meet who are total computer newbies (since OS X is a trillion times easier than Windows will ever be), that's not going to make that number go down any. I'm not dissing Microsoft -- I'm suggesting areas in which they need to improve. Adding full support for CSS2 and PNG would be a great place to start (screw security, PNG was finalized in 1996 [iIRC], they have some work to do). However, they're coming out with a new version, version 7.0, and it isn't any different under the hood as far as rendering goes (if it is, it'll surprise me -- they were at a developer conference when they said that only security improvements will be in 7.0). The major rewrite of IE is due sometime in 2015. Someday, they'll rewrite it in C#. If they don't, they're hipocritical. In my opinion as a web site and web application developer, IE 7 is going to be way overrated.

I personally think Microsoft should call it IE 6.1 or 6.5 or something. The core rendering technology isn't going to change; they're just going to audit some of the code and put in security restrictions. But then again, if they did the version numbers properly (changed the major number when they make a major change to how it functions), they'd be on MSIE 4.5 or so. Since the core rendering technology hasn't really changed since IE 4. Sure, they've fixed numerous bugs with the rendering and finally finished full CSS1 support in IE6, but it's still mostly the same. Nothing entirely new or interesting. My main question is this: when can I expect proper PNG support? I don't mean PNG support via a DirectX filter:, because that's not proper PNG support (and it doesn't support translucent PNGs all the time -- some situations are hopeless -- view the IE7 JavaScript hack readme for more information). Or proper support for position: fixed; and some of the more basic CSS2 features that are missing.

Well, the DRM wasn't broken... so they aren't lying... It's just that if you play the song back, you can use a program to record the output of that song and save it to your hard drive in an unprotected format. If anyone else offered this kind of service, it'd be "vulnerable" too. Think back to tape dubbing -- if you could play music on a stereo, you could copy it to a tape. Even if you play it from another tape. I think I'm fine and dandy with my 10 free songs on iTunes (I drink a lot of Pepsi).

Yeah. Sun just wants to open source their stuff so their program will get accepted by the community and will take off like Mozilla did. Open sourcing Netscape was the best thing Netscape ever did. They have no real desire to open source their code, nor do they really want to do this. They're trying to soar like Mozilla and take the code that the community put together and put it into their own product. Think about it as free outsourcing. Almost all open source developers know this, so it's very doubtful that OpenSolaris will become any more than a pipe dream for Sun.

I have 11GB of music (and growing), 8GB of which I listen to on a regular basis. I would have to say that an iPod is worth my money.

There's also Sveta Portable Audio or something like that from dbpoweramp.com. It's pretty nice.

Yeah, but, the Internet grid can't go down very easily . The Internet runs a form of mesh topology. That is, everything is connected to everything else (really, it's a group of routers under the same administrative group that are connected to eachother, then the ones on the border of another administrative group connect to other administrative groups). You'd have to take down about two thirds of the entire Internet infrastructure for it to make a major impact (well, besides speed drops and not being able to reach sites that have no route from themselves to you -- i.e. they're not connected to any routers that have access to you).

Opera suffers from two flaws: - it's not free - it's way too complicated for most users. I spent a week looking at it and there are so many options under one menu that it made me go "man, that's overkill" However, Opera is MUCH BETTER than Gecko in an embedded environment such as a STB, PDA, phone, etc. In fact, I'd much rather see a "powered by Opera" logo on a phone than a "powered by Mozilla Gecko" or "powered by Mozilla". Simply because Opera has many many different build modes, like "tiny", "desktop", "textonly", and so on, and Mozilla/Gecko only has a couple (embedded, desktop). Minimoz (Mozilla Embedded) is okay, but it's still slower larger and less fun to use than Opera Embedded. But on the desktop I wouldn't give up my Firefox for anything. Okay, well, maybe the MozSuite or Epiphany (both are Gecko).

IRCXpro is not the only bloody IRCX server out there. You have to be more specific than "Runtime error 400" (which is an invalid runtime error anyways -- 400 belongs to the MS Common Controls UI library, and IRCXpro's server should NOT be using a UI). Subscript out of range (RTE 9) means the variable is split up into an array and the program attempts to access a value outside of that range. Take for instance: string = "This is a test" split(string)[0] = "This" split(string)[1] = "is" split(string)[2] = "a" split(string)[3] = "test" (that is not any specific programming language) The program is attempting to address split(string)[4], which does not exist. So it's a bug in the program. Go to the bug reporting facility of your server and report the bug (I'm not aware that IRCXpro has one, although ignitionServer does, and Microsoft Exchange Chat Service 5.5/2000 is no longer supported by Microsoft for updates, but they do have a bug system) You can try redownloading it, but it could also be something you screwed up in the configuration or something.

may not be what you're looking for, but it's got quite a few commands listed. before an argument starts, an IRCX server is an IRCD, because a daemon is a server, and IRCX is an extension to the IRC protocol.

that doesn't help much. which IRCD?

IRCXpro's user manual covers how to operate the application. It doesn't cover the commands it supports or (at least last time I read it) the modes it supports. Since I believe my documentation to be more complete than IRCXpro's documentation, I linked to that.

There *is* no IR-CX manual. The IR-CX draft itself only shows the modes IR-CX adds. It says nothing about the underlying RFC 1459 technology. I'm trying to help, not spam. I can't help it if my documentation is more complete than IR-CXpro. (ignore - if you see it -- CyberSitter sucks)

ignitionServer Supported Commands (from Start > Programs > ignitionServer > Documentation, or ignition-project.com > products > ignitionserver > documentation, or google for "ignitionServer Supported Commands"). Still somewhat incomplete, but I add to it nearly every day. Will not help you much at all if you use IRCXpro, and there's plenty of reasons you should use ignitionServer instead of IRCXpro. And I'm not just saying that from a "I'm the developer" point of view -- when I rewrote iS from its early MSN-emulating days, I did so because the only other IRCX server alternatives, well, sucked. IRCXpro/IRCplus aren't really in my opinion the best products in the universe, Exchange isn't free, and TES-X is written in Java (it'll only run well on Linux and Solaris and Java Embedded -- it will run like crap on Windows and MacOS X).

being as this is in the IRCX forum, I think he was asking if IRCX servers have the same modes MSN does, so he can transition easily from MSN to IRCX. that being the case, IRCX servers are IRCDs (don't argue with me unless you happen to use UNIX -- IRCX is an extension to the IRC protocol, and IRCD means "IRC Server") -- which means that different kinds (ignitionServer, IRCXpro, etc.) will have different channel and user modes (although some will be the same -- i.e. the ones that are standard). so that's why I posted the iS mode list.

umodes != channel levels on IRCX, the following channel levels are supported: .Owner = +q @Host = +o +Voice = +v Normal = -qov umodes are almost always different from IRC server to IRC server. here is a list of all of the umodes that ignitionServer supports. I need to update it for ignitionServer 0.3.6, but it's otherwise complete.

wrong forum perhaps?

as was discussed on our forums, you've solved this. anyways, you have to edit ircx.conf manually because: 1) we don't have a UI for it yet -- we're working on getting it out of beta, that's not that important 2) we assume you're able to read, which is all that is required. the reason X:DIE is there in the first place is to force you to configure ignitionServer (imagine what would happen if there were thousands of ignitionServers running all with an admin password of "admin" -- that could be very dangerous). that's why it's on by default -- to make you go "oh, I forgot to set it up!"

I would $md5() the IP (well, if the mIRC MD5 implementation didn't suck). ignitionServer offers this feature. Basically, the IPs are all unique, and therefore the hashes, and only IRC Operators can see the IPs actually associated with the connection. And the hashes will always match a specific IP address/hostname. Similarily to how your password's hash will always remain the same until you change your password. Don't know how well this works in mIRC though...

Well, I did make an annotated version of the IRCX draft... And that's not IRCX per se, that's standard IRC server linking. So if you modify the modes it'll work on any RFC 1459 compliant IRC server with RFC 1459 compliant linking. Unfortunately, iS and Tes-X are the only two IRCX servers I know that do that.

For that to work, you'd have to use an omnicient connection, such as a server-server connection. Some servers might allow this to occur as an IRCop, but it's wrong (IRCop != god) and is a major Achillies' heel -- if your account gets compromised, the entire network gets compromised. You'll have to say what IRCX server you're using for anyone to properly help, but I'll go ahead and tell you what commands to use to become an omnicient connection in ignitionServer (you'll need to use sockets and sockwrite, someone else here can handle that). PASS mypassword SERVER hostbot.local 1 :Host Bot After those two commands (in that order), the server will respond with a nick/channel list, and then you're ready to do stuff. To host someone, send this data: :hostbot.local MODE #ChannelName +o NickName Modify accordingly for +q or +v. When you're done hosting everyone, split from the network you've formed by closing the socket. You will get a netsplit notice, but that's normal. And you'll need C:/N: lines in ircx.conf for it too: C:127.0.0.1:mypassword:hostbot.local:6667:100 N:127.0.0.1:mypassword:hostbot.local::100 Again, that's for iS 0.3.5. Not 0.3.4 or earlier.

http://www.ignition-project.com/ Free, open source IRCX server. Faster than IRCXpro too.