I wish they would make it so that addons and plugins can only be installed inside Firefox (via addons.mozilla.org, File > Open or exceptions for trusted sites.)

I have seven plugins listed and I only installed two of them.

  2007 Microsoft Office system - Installed with Office 2007
  Google Update - Installed with Google Chrome (??)
  Java Deployment Toolkit - Installed with Java (on Firefox blocklist)
  Java Platform - Installed with Java
  Picasa - Installed with Google Picassa
  Shockwave Flash - I installed this
  Silverlight - I installed this

In the extension category only two are there that I didn't installed

  FiddlerHook - Installed with Fiddler (not removed after uninstalling Fiddler, uninstall button greyed out in Firefox)
  Java Console - Installed with Java

That wouldn't be good for Linux distributions which have their own package management system. For example Fedora offers the following packages: mozilla-adblockplus, mozilla-vlc, mozilla-noscript etc.

IMHO, the Linux distros are doing it wrong. Just because you have a package management system, doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. I think hackers have seen the absolutely shitpile that most distro's make when they try to override things like CPAN, Ruby Gems, etc. They really need to go hands off on some of those things and let the secondary package manager do it's job

Just because you've got a hammer, doesn't mean every problem is a nail.

Definitely. As a hacktivist, I'm sure you're familiar with the dangers of browser plugins. I find that browsers allow this behaviour to be extremely unnerving.

Personally I look at it like this. While I'm not physically 'stealing' their product, I am still profiting by not paying X amount for its use.

As an example, imagine if you are planning on purchasing a copy of Photoshop at $1000 but before you leave to go to the store you do a quick search on your favorite torrent site. Sure enough it's there and you download it, saving yourself $1000 while still benefiting from the use of the software and using the $1000 on something else.

So while software piracy might not harm the developer directly, it greatly benefits the person who downloads the software.

When the Intel Macs were initial released there was a contest to install Windows XP on it natively (before bootcamp was even announced.) Enough people donated to the prize pool that the winner walked away with 14,000 dollars.

I hadn't heard that. Thanks for the anecdote.

Does anyone have any sales statistics comparing volume of iPods purchased from apple.com to volume of iPods purchased at retail (including Apple retail stores since they don't offer engraving?)

Because even if what he is saying is true I doubt that the fraction of people that get engraved iPods and then resell can influence the secondary market filled with iPods from almost all technology retailers and Apple's retail stores themselves.

Can you expand on what you thought was subpar about using Latex on Windows 7? I use Latex almost exclusively and for such an obscure (compared to Office) document publishing system, Latex has some pretty amazing tools available for Windows.

If you go the full IDE path you have TeXnicCenter, WinEdt, and LEd.

If you go text editor path you have your favorite editor to write the source and latexmk to automatically build when the source file changes.

Combine your favorite way of writing with MiKTex for the core program and package management and you have a bulletproof way of using Latex in Windows.

To expand on this. It is illegal in Canada for anyone without a proper engineering degree to call themselves an engineer. For example a computer scientist cannot call themselves an engineer while a computer or software engineer could.

And yet, one place I worked on a Co-op term in Ontario gave me the title "Software Engineer".

Komodo IDE and Komodo Edit by ActiveState is a pretty successful use of the Mozilla platform.

It used a "tweaked" Mozilla, I don't know if it still does. (I poked around but it doesn't say.)

http://trentmick.blogspot.com/2007/09/open-komodo-and-code_8...

which contains the interesting quote in the comments "Most current XUL Runner apps that I know about (those that get mentioned on planet.mozilla.org) tend to have their own patches against XUL Runner that haven't yet made it into the core sources to fix issues specific to their app."

Which was my experience with the platform too.

It is true that I have missed that, but you'd need to cite another twenty or thirty projects of a similar size before you'd catch up to the hype. (And I'd still question whether Komodo actually gets anything out of being on Mozilla vs. QT. Cost/benefits analysis of things on the Mozilla platform tend to miss the opportunity costs of having started out on a better-but-more-humble framework in the first place.)

(And while I won't hammer on it too hard, it would be nice if the app that is putatively on the platform actually ran on the platform instead of a modified platform. I don't have to go patching QT or GTK every time I want to make an app. If someone knows that it runs on XULRunner, great, please say so. All my googling is getting is people saying how nice it would be.)

"All my googling is getting is people saying how nice it would be."

Because that's all there is. It doesn't run on XULRunner. Getting it to do so continues to be a project goal, but it doesn't as of right now.

Maybe successful financially, but too slow for me to use.

I've never had any problems with slowness in Komodo IDE.

If OneNote is anything like Word you can use LaTeX notation once you are inside an equation environment (Alt + =).

For example in Word typing Alt + = \int^1_2 \sum^x_(x+1) \ge \sqrt(25)

Would produce exactly what you would get in LaTeX.

You can even copy/paste between applications that support MathML.

Sweet; I haven't yet had an opportunity to use the new equation editor. That's exactly what I want; though.