March 2008
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No Monday blues around here today — it’s Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary! On March 31, 1998 Mozilla was officially launched and the Mozilla source code became publicly available for the first time. Mitchell Baker has a write up of what Mozilla and its community have accomplished in these past 10 years and what’s in store for the next 10. Here are a few highlights:
- Converted a closed, proprietary development process into a vibrant, transparent, open source project
- Grown into a massive global community, quite possibly the largest open source project in the world
- Developed a set of long-term, vibrant projects — Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, Bugzilla, Calendar — most, and possibly all of which have millions of users
- Become the software provider of choice for over 170 million people
- Proved that open source development can produce great end user products
- Brought the Internet to millions of people in their language
- Moved the overall state of browser software forward dramatically
- Become a technology platform others use to create products built on Mozilla technologies, and in some cases competitive with Mozilla products
A huge thanks to our wonderful community that has helped make this all possible! Please stay tuned for more details on how we’ll honor the anniversary over the year.
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Written by mary on March 31st, 2008 with no comments.
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Now that my ban on bloggers in the locker room has been lifted by the NBA , the "Joes" of the blogger world will have the same access as the "Pros". Those that get paid. I can't wait to see the results.
The people who have complained and dismissed the blogger ban the loudest are those that have the most to lose. They are the ones getting paid. If the unwashed blogging masses have some masters among them, who knows what could happen to the balance of power in the sports media world.
Of course, my preference had been to avoid having to make any qualitative decisions about which bloggers should be in or out of the locker room. Since that is no longer possible, I'm happy to share my feelings about the state of the sports blogosphere.
What sports blogging has become, in most cases, is the internet equivalent of Talk Soup or VH1's "Best ..... " series. On Talk Soup a host throws out witty comments about some TV show. On VH1, a series of guests throw out their comments about some video relevant to the show's topic. If it is witty enough, the show draws an audience.
On the net, the most popular sports bloggers do the exact same thing. They troll the net looking for other people's work and then throw out some witty comments or a simple rant to complement a link to that work.. Or they sit in front of the TV and throw out posts/comments about the game.
I'm not saying that there isn't a market for this. There is. Just as there is a market for Talk Soup on E!, and all the Vh1 shows. It even takes talent to be able to be witty and hold an audience, whether its on TV or online. But, the talent and the success from that talent doesn't require access to the locker room.
The people that complained the loudest about the ban, really didn't have a good reason to be in the locker room.
And from what I can tell, non of their readers complained that their blogs suffered in any way shape or form when they didnt have access to the locker room.Rather, they did the smart thing and used the ban to promote themselves. Which is fine by me. I hope it drove them a ton of traffic.
So I invite any blogger to post samples of their work here as a comment. if its good, and I am the only judge, then you will get an email invite to get credentialed to cover a game in Dallas (its up to you to get there). I don't care if you work for a major company, or are in 8th grade. All will be given equal access.
Just as I did with
Ben Collns. I think I gave him his first shot to write for the Mavs website when he was 13. If you can write, you deserve the same opportunities to communicate about the Mavs as someone who works for ESPN, a major newspaper or network. In the blogging business, the Joes can be better than the Pros.
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Written by Mark Cuban on March 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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Monday marks a very special day in Mozilla history — the 10 year anniversary of the Mozilla source code release. We’d like to give you the chance to hear from some folks who have been with us from the beginning. Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, and Chris Hofmann will join us for a special one hour retrospective. Asa Dotzler, will be hosting and asking our guests to reflect on the early days, major inflection points for the organization, and what’s in store for the next 10 years of Mozilla. Prior to the live broadcast you can catch “Mozilla Memories,” video messages from community members and Mozilla employees, starting at 10 a.m. PDT.
So please join us on Monday for this special Air Mozilla Live.
Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, and Chris Hofmann.
When: Monday, March 31, from 11:00:00 - 12:00:00 PDT (UTC-07:00)
Where: View the webcast and join the chat at air.mozilla.com.
Also: As part of the year-long celebration of Mozilla’s 10 years, we’re gathering up video memories from our community of contributors. If you’d like to share some of your experiences with Mozilla, please upload them to YouTube and tag them with “mozilla-anniversary” so that we can locate them. You’ll be able to see the first batch of video memories starting one hour before Monday’s show and we hope to add another batch at least once a month.
(If you do record a video memory, hold onto the clip so that if we decided to put it into the Air Mozilla program, we can use the higher quality footage rather than YouTube’s downsampled version.)
A special thanks goes out to Mogulus for supporting this production of Air Mozilla.
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Written by mary on March 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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I first read this statement on techmeme, which took me to
Mathew Ingrams Blog, which revealed that the line came from a college student who was part of an Intelligence Group focus group. The words have stuck with me ever since. Put it right up there with "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog" . It says everything about what the internet is, what it isn't and how it has matured to the point that we use it far differently than even 5 years ago.
I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about how we live in an
Open Book World. That there is no such thing as information overload, that when we need information, its so easy to find, that we just google it. There is no value for memorizing information , unless of course you are on Jeopardy. Value comes from knowing how best to look. Being an expert in using search and community tools. Call it being the SEOs of our own lives.
But what does "If the news is important, it will find me" really say ?
To this college student, there really is no reason to know anything but what is right in front of you. If you put your virtual self in enough networks, facebook, myspace, twitter, wherever,
someone is going to ping you with "the latest". We always talk about entertainment on the net and on tv as being different because TV is lean back, and internet is lean forward. It looks like information distribution has become delineated in the same way.
In this day and age, there are the things we are specifically interested in. The groups we "lean forward" and join, whether they are message boards, social networking groups, or websites we bookmark and visit, the tv shows we watch or DVR. Then there is everything else , which we trust will find us. The lean back information.
Its exactly what I do. I have a declining (although slowly) number of RSS feeds that I follow, and a stable number of aggregation sites that I "lean forward" and read. Everything else is extraneous and "lean back". If its important, someone wlil email me, post on my profile (and I will get an email alert for it), or one of the email newsletters I subscribe to will send me an E Lert and "it will find me"
This is what Facebook was trying to commercialize with its beacon. Its what Spokeo and FriendFeed are trying to consolidate and simplify. Its what twitter is trying to further enable. It will be interesting to see if it works o if people like things the way it is now.
Its the natural evolution and maturity of the internet. We have moved from discovery to activation to optimization to ubiquitous utility that allows the information you need to find you.
Put another way, we have finally reached the digital equivalent of
Timothy OLeary's "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out"
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Written by Mark Cuban on March 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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Best Efforts. That is what you get when you try to send internet video. Its absolutely impossible to assure anyone , anywhere that a video you or any Content Delivery Network hosts will be able to be delivered at the equivalent quality of any TV show being broadcast today.
There is a reason why Content Delivery Networks exist. They exist because the internet is a best efforts medium. The internet will always be a best efforts medium, if only because of Net Neutrality. If all bits are created and delivered on an equal basis, then there is no way to be sure that the bits carrying your TV show will be delivered with any Quality of Service assurances.
For some reason, every Internet bigot out there seems to think that there is some magic bullet that will cure this problem. There is a reason why Cable companies spend so much money on equipment and engineers to make sure that your favorite TV show shows up when you change the channel. Those same engineers do everything they possibly can to make sure that you get that show at the highest possible picture quality. Delivery is not just about bandwidth allocation, there is an incredible amount of engineering that goes into getting TV signals to your screen. It works because those engineers control the signal end to end. Its deterministic, not best efforts.
Its for this reason I have turned away from the internet as the future of entertainment and am focused on Digital TV, whether its delivered by a satellite, telco or cable company. While its true that the companies offering TV often step all over themselves and make things far more difficult than they should be, all of the real innovation is happening on the Digital TV side of the ledger. Why ? Because its a stable, deterministic platform.
With digital video, particularly for cable and telcos, there are specifications and tolerances that developers can use to design interactive applications. Satellite has different advantages in terms of broadcast solutions.
in addition, those set top boxes that continue to be upgraded and swapped out more often than you swap out your computers ? They are application specific platforms. They are being built at the software and hardware level to drive digital video and interactivity. Contrast that with the Windows /Vista platforms that most users have.
Cable has
Tru2WAY, Dish Network and DIRECTV have their development platforms. They are not perfect, but the feature sets are expanding and the application base and number of developers are expanding as well.
Call me crazy, but when given the choice of developing new applications for a deterministic platform connected to a specialty application box connected to a high definition TV with a remote control or a best efforts internet platform connected to who knows how fast a connection to a PC running who knows what operating system connected to a monitor and a keyboard, I will take the first option.
But thats just me.
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Written by Mark Cuban on March 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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Great news from Basil Hashem, Mike Morgan and Madhava Enros: the refreshed, redesigned and ready for interaction Mozilla Add-ons web site is now live!
Here’s what Basil had to say:
The AMO team has been hard at work for the last many months on a major site redesign and is pleased to announce the availability of the new AMO site. This is a significant release and chock-full of goodies for end users and add-on authors alike. The focus has been predominantly to provide a visual refresh, simplify navigation and rework the add-on developer tools area. But that doesn’t quite capture just how much effort has gone into this release. So, here is a full rundown of all the changes.
And some praise for our editors and localizers from Mike Morgan:
Our editors have worked hard to review new and updated add-ons as we move towards Firefox 3 this year and our localizers translated roughly 200 new strings in AMO templates in a little over three weeks for 24 locales (wow).
Lastly, some user experience notes from Madhava Enros:
This release is particularly exciting for me, partly because the wireframes and interaction-model for the site were the first things I worked on when I arrived at Mozilla. Also, though, because alongside the re-skinning and reorganization of the site, I think we’ve managed to improve the user-experience of finding and installing add-ons in a number of interesting ways.
Add it all up and the site that’s served over 600 million add-on downloads is now even more useful for more people than ever before. Check out the updated Mozilla Add-ons site here: http://addons.mozilla.org
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Written by Paul Kim on March 27th, 2008 with no comments.
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With Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers now out in the wild, we have received a good deal of positive feedback regarding our plans for CSS. The feedback includes the need for the specifics around CSS support for IE8 Standards Mode for both the current Beta and what is projected for the final release. This information allows you, the developer community, to test your sites and give quality feedback for features that are actually implemented in the current beta release. These details are posted up on MSDN in the following document: CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer.
Once again, we thank you for your support and passion for building great products.
Doug Stamper
Principal Program Manager Lead
Internet Explorer Developer Experience Team
Written by ieblog on March 27th, 2008 with no comments.
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Hi! I am Saloni Mira Rai, a program manager on the Layout team, and I’d like to walk you through the changes in Zoom for Internet Explorer 8.
Zoom lets you enlarge or reduce the view of a web page to improve readability. The feature is particularly useful on really large and really small displays, allowing for scaling of content while maintaining the intended layout of the page. The second iteration of the zoom feature (first shipped in Internet Explorer 7) focuses on improving the existing experience by providing a higher quality, more predictable, and persistent zooming experience.
What You Can Expect
As you zoom, IE8 will size the text and images and reflow the page to make it easier to read. You will not see a horizontal scrollbar for most mainstream scenarios. It’s easier to show than explain, so here’s an example:
Zooming the IE Blog to 150% in IE7 looked like this:
Notice that text moves off the screen and a horizontal scrollbar appears at the bottom of the screen.
Here is the same page zoomed to 150% in IE8 Beta 1:
Text is now being wrapped and no horizontal scrollbar is needed.
Digging In A Little Deeper
NOTE: This section is for readers who want to understand the internal workings of Adaptive Zoom, and how it might affect site design.
Internet Explorer 8 Adaptive Zoom is founded on the concept of scaling elements pre-layout. This is significantly different from Internet Explorer 7 Zoom behavior, which was analogous to “magnifying” the webpage – elements were scaled post layout and then re-drawn on screen.
Due to this important change, horizontal scrollbars are introduced only when the fixed width of the scaled content is greater than the width of the viewport. This is exactly like resizing regular layout on an un-zoomed webpage.
Also, text wrapping is affected by this change. In IE7 Zoom, line lengths and line breaks were not recalculated as the zoom factor increased / decreased. This led to situations where text lines were either too small (resulting in lots of white space) or too large (resulting in text runs that would go off the screen, requiring horizontal scrollbars). In IE8, line lengths are recalculated based on available space before the text is rendered on screen. Then, line breaks are inserted all the while taking the new lengths into account.
In addition, it is important to understand how common page elements and properties respond to zoom.
- Fonts and text: The glyph itself is not scaled. Rather, the font size is scaled and then the appropriate glyph is used. The important thing to note is that fonts do not scale linearly by design. For example, if text at 12pt is scaled to 110%, the resulting font size is calculated as 13.2pts. However this font size does not exist, therefore it is rounded to the nearest available size – 13pt.
- Fixed, auto and relative sizing: Dimension scaling is one of the most important improvements in IE8’s Adaptive Zoom. Dimensions specified using absolute units (e.g.: in, cm, mm, etc) or device and font dependent units (e.g.: px, ex, em, etc) are scaled as per the zoom level. Therefore, at 200%, 100px becomes 200px and 20pt becomes 40pt.
Content-dependent dimensions, i.e. percent and auto, are not scaled as they are computed during layout. Therefore, at 200%, a width of 50% of the viewport does not become 100% of the same. This is a marked change from Zoom in IE7.
- Positioning: Positioned elements grow and shrink like in-flow elements. However their new position is determined by the properties set, and the offsets used.
An absolutely positioned element, if offset to the left by 100px, will shift towards the right when zoomed in. It is possible for it to go off screen.
Similarly, floats will be positioned with respect to their container as per the normal rules of CSS. If the width of the container changes with zoom, then the position of the float will change. Zooming of adjacent floats is exactly like resizing the window – if the width of the viewport is not large enough to accommodate the floats, the last one in markup will drop to the next line.
- DHTML properties: In IE7 zoom, some properties were treated as physical (e.g.: mouse coordinates) while others were logical (offset). This implementation essentially required web developers to be aware of or manually calculate the zoom state based on the property being used. In IE8 zoom, all DHTML properties are now assumed to be logical. This enables some key scenarios such as fly-out menus and “drag-and-drop”. There are a few known issues, such as the incorrect scaling with screen.width and screen.height, that were not addressed in Beta 1. These will be fixed in a future release.
For more details and information on the scenarios mentioned above, and additional scenarios, such as those involving overflow, tables, etc., please see the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers: Technology Overview.
Getting Your Site Ready For Internet Explorer 8 Zoom
Web developers should not expect to write any special code for adaptive zoom. Since all properties are logical, and scaling is purely internal, developers do not even have to be aware of zoom.
If you are interested in improving your site user experience with zoom, I recommend you test your site with different zoom factors, resolutions and window dimensions. Here are some initial things to think about as you do this:
- At what point do horizontal scrollbars appear? Does the user need to scroll to read a single line of text?
- Does content quickly go off screen because of fixed sizing and positioning?
- Does the overflow:hidden value on any elements make content inaccessible?
- Do fly-out menus adapt to available screen real estate, or do options go off screen making them inaccessible to the user?
Thanks for reading and I look forward to your feedback!
Saloni Mira Rai
Program Manager
Written by ieblog on March 25th, 2008 with no comments.
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The finalists have been chosen and voting has begun! We received close to 2,000 submissions from a growing global community of over 3,400 members on the Flickr contest group. Picking the top 5 was a very challenging task as there were many amazing designs to choose from. But the final decision is up to you!
Please take a moment and help us select the official Firefox 3 t-shirt by voting for your favorite design on the Mozilla Store. Voting will end on Sunday March 30th at 11:59 PM (PST). We’re excited to see which design wins!
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Written by tshahian on March 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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This gem of a post recently popped up in my Techmeme/TechCrunch RSS feed.
its Michael Arrington lamenting the hassle/aggravation/frustration of having to deal with a daily onslaught of thousands of emails.
Michael, I feel your pain. Making my email readily available seemed like a really smart thing to do when I first bought the Mavs in 2000. In hindsight, it was a huge mistake. Now of the thousand plus emails I get in a day, a hundred may be of the "You Suck" variety. Another 100 or so are of the "I want " variety. I would say that less than 20pct of the emails I get in any given day are truly of any interest and value to me and 99pct of those are from employees.
The good news is that I have a filter system setup so that I can push emails from people I already know or do business with into folders that I know are of relative importance.
Yet, I still trudge through the emails from the sports people who want to rant for the sake of ranting, giving them the shortest of glances, just in case they truly are a customer of the Mavs with a valid issue. I still glance at the "I want" emails, just in case there is something of truly redeeming value.
Unfortunately, there is one element of email that I have been forced to give up on. I have emails going back to the 1980s. Starting in about 1994, I have as many emails as I have been able to save as possible, up until about 12 months ago.
I had always wanted to keep each and every email I ever got figuring that it would be a history of my life that my kids and their kids could look back at just as I loved to look at old postcards, letters and pictures of my parents and grandparents. I kept as much as I could. I would estimate that I am well past 1mm emails in aggregate to date.
But as people got broadband, they started sending bigger and bigger attachments. So the attachments were the first thing to go. Then as people added mobile email, the volume exploded. Everything became email worthy. Which took my email files to sizes they have never been before. In fact, the biggest hassle in dealing with all of this is the 4gbs limit to copying files in Windows platforms. Zipping works, most of the time, but not all and the not all times make it not worth risking
So I started breaking them into smaller and smaller files, which just made things harder to manage and find. Even with indexing software out there.
And as far as moving everything over to my mac ? Entourage ? Setting up rules in Entourage or any mac mail i have tried takes an eternity. Try recreating more than 1k rules. Even trying to set them up as they come in hinders my productivity to an unacceptable level. So now I survive with my Windows Mail Server Box and my laptops taking in only current email.
So Michael, I feel your pain. The idea of living "The Email Life" worked so well for so long. Now, each day I say goodbye to my little email friends, I feel like Im cheating the future.
So now I just keep what I need to keep. HDNet, Mavs, 2929 stuff that I need to have available for reference.
Its kind of disapp
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Written by Mark Cuban on March 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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