celticjames

I suspect that none of those employees were planning to stick around after the IPO anyway.It's sounds like a terrible place to work.

Some extra scorn via Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

> you can build relationships with all the things you care about - from local businesses to global brands

Do people in marketing even hear themselves? I'm going to be charitable and assume this is ad copy aimed at other marketers because no real human has ever wished they could build a relationship with a global brand. Now if you excuse me, I need to go like the Guinness page on facebook.

Something like 40% of Mozilla code is written by community contributors, which is quite remarkable. How many of those non-employees are paid by someone else specifically to work on Mozilla I don't know. i.e. I don't know if IBM pays people to work on Firefox they way they pay people to work on Linux.

3. It's like the Mozilla Firefox vs Debian Iceweasel controversy. Or Redhat vs Centos. The code is open, but the trademarks are copyrighted. If Growl is a trademark and the brand artwork is non-free, then forks can't use it without permission.

I kind of respect the choice of Mozilla and Redhat to defend their trademarks because it's partly an issue of quality control and reputation. But I do prefer projects that put branding under a creative commons license. It's closer to the spirit of free software. I suggest the forked Growl choose a new name and put the branding under a free license.

Off topic: Certificate Authorities are a plot point in Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End". He's really the first novelist to grasp how dramatic revoking a certificate is.

I'm not sure I understand the real name policy of either Facebook or Google+. Isn't the whole point of a social graph that it is personally curated by me? The identities of my friends/circles are verified by me.

With G+ it's possible to filter your output (into circles) but there's no way to filter the input. I've put all my hacker friends into a hacker circle, but when I browse that stream I get all their public/extended posts plus the posts for whatever circle they've put me in. Basically, they know I'm following, but they can't know why I'm following. I can't signal to them that I want them to put me in circle for all their hacking posts and not their pictures-of-cats posts.

I've actually started making posts that say, "If you can see this post, I'm following you because [X]."

If I might reframe the issue slightly, I don’t think the problem is that coders are expected to make FOSS contributions. The problem is that coders are expected to do significant amounts of unpaid work. We all laud Google Summer of Code because it lets young people get some traction without starving. Other companies that want the benefit of hiring people with FOSS experience need to put their money where their mouth is and fund FOSS contributions. There is an awful trend of corporations wanting experienced workers but doing nothing in terms of internships, apprenticeships and mentoring.

Articles that compare the market share of free products are always a bit weird. If you are selling something, you naturally want it to sell best. But for a free product (free as in free speech) the main concern is giving users choice. There mere existence of choice changes the game. Debates about the most installs miss the point.

The Android emulator is a full ARM processor emulator. Very slow and probably always will be. My experience is that Android development is mostly impossible without the real hardware. This Android x86 port looks promising though: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

1. If it was part of trunk, you'd have to wait longer for new updates. As it is, Firebug can push updates without waiting on Firefox updates. 2. The Firebug developers and core mozilla developers overlap a lot. There is work done in trunk that complements Firebug. So it's has plenty of official blessing. 3. There isn't any performance advantage to putting it in trunk. Extensions in mozilla are first class citizens. 4. It would probably confuse ordinary users.

This Nokia/Microsoft deal is really terrib... Hey, look at those shiny phones!

This announcement doesn't say anything about versioning for the underlying mozilla platform (which moves from 1.92 to 2.0 between Firefox 3.6 and 4.0). The versioning for the platform only changes when the api changes and breaks binary compatibility for people who use binary components in extensions. Authors writing pure JavaScript extensions can code them to be compatible across multiple Firefox versions.

Three points for a link that advocates quack medicine? Not what I come to HN for.

You know who else shares my phone number and address? The phone book!

One thing that helps Chrome release often is that the api for building extensions is all javascript. By comparison, Firefox extensions can have binary components. This means there needs to be a certain amount of platform stability or extensions will break every six weeks. I think that in the future we'll see faster release cycles for Firefox as the api for extension building becomes more js based and less dependent on xpcom components.

Multiple meanings for 'tits' are also a consideration. (Maybe my monitor or eyes suck, but I had to do a tits vs fuck only ngram search to see that the big spike is in fact tits.)

I don't think that's the issue. I think it is more of a case of whether or not the corporation and the foundation really are two separate organizations. Until the new director of the foundation arrived (Mark Surman), the foundation didn't really appear to do anything. To the IRS, this may have looked like the foundation was only a tax shelter for the corporation and not a real thing.

Now there's all this Drumbeat Festival stuff, etc.. coming out the foundation. Clearly they are trying to position themselves as a non-profit that advocates for the open web rather than just a company that gives away a browser. Owning a corporation that gives away a browser is just part of that cause. Hopefully that's how the IRS sees it.

Sadly, I don't think a lot of the foundation sponsored stuff really ever links up with anything happening on the corporate side. At least from the outside, it still looks like the corporation wags the foundation and not the other way around.

Edit: Yes, the foundation does own the corporation.

Anyone know the technical details? DRM? Remastered recordings? Bitrates? Available in all markets?

i see that Live at the BBC, Anthology, and Yellow Submarine Songtrack (not Soundtrack) are not there. So not quite compleat beatles.

Great advice, but two caveats:

1. Employers are often focused on hiring very specific skills sets. Having fixed a C++ bug in Chromium should impress them, but if they need a Django expert they still see you as a novice. It can be hard to present yourself as a well-rounded candidate if all your experience is with one project.

2. In a couple of interviews I've had, I've noticed a distinct bias towards valuing paid work more than open source contributions. It's often hard to get interviewers to understand that something I've done for free is on the same scale (or greater) than things I've been paid for.

There's another company, Skyfire, that's been pushing a similar solution for the past few years. I've never met anyone who actually uses it.

FTA: > consolidating the search box and address bar seems so obvious

I know that Mozilla's engineers would love to do that, but the search box is their revenue model. Google pays a lot of money for that box to be there.

Good source for a layman's explanation of how we measure where things are in the sky is Astronomy Cast: http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-171-solar-system-m... http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-170-coordinate-sys...

Bad reasoning: Remember the hits, forget the misses.

New GOP site looks good to me: http://hammerandsteele.com/?u=http://xkcd.com/personal/gop/

Mozilla Corporation employs 200+ people, but the community contribution, measured in commits, is substantial. But what you say about management is true. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand does. Communication between the corporation and the foundation is very poor.

Must use Chrome? Doesn't sound like it uses open web standards. Will other browsers need a plugin (eg. Gears) to make this work?

It's more accurate to say that Firefox 3.6 is written on top of the Mozilla 1.9.1 platform, which includes technologies such as NSPR or XPCOM for some low level system interaction. I don't think anything at the UI rendering level uses those technologies.

Is it possible to turn things around and compile an iPhone app to run on Android/Flash/etc.? I'm sure it would be a monumental task, but could the headers in the Apple SDK be wrapped in a cross platform library? Or is there a rule against that too?