«

Oliver Wong wrote:
> No. The intended behaviour is to notify the user of updates available to
> software that is installed on his/her computer, and not to notify them of
> updates to software which isn't installed on his/her computer.

Since Firefox is software which is installed on my computer, I rest my
case. Yep -- I would find it screwy if the Firefox auto-update told me
about a new version of Windows, or even of Thunderbird.

> Given that the FireFox 2.0 and Firefox 1.5 series are considered
different
> products by Mozilla

What Mozilla internaly considers them is irrelevant to the end user. The
end user sees "Firefox version whatever". None of this is making any
sense, anyway -- they could as well consider Firefox 1.4 and 1.5
"different products", or even 2.0 and 2.0.0.1 "different products".
That's just word-games.

> Actually, yeah, your comparison is apt. Some people feel that 1.5 is
> better than 2.X.

That is illogical; 2.0 is a straight upgrade rather than a sidegrade.
Firefox 1.5 is not to 2.0 as it is to Opera, or IE, which is what you
seem to be claiming.

>>but Firefox 1.x to 2.0 is a straight upgrade, and free, rather than a
>>lateral move that costs money.
>
> People disagree with this assertion.

What "people"? There's a good reason why wikipedia would flag your
article with "This article contains weasel words" if you'd written this
there, you know...

Tim Slattery wrote:
> AFAIK, Windows Update doesn't let you know about Vista or offer to
> upgrade you to that system.

That's largely because Vista isn't free. It's also not true anyway. I
just did some research, and Windows Update did something suspiciously
like what you are describing a few months back, when the big "Vista is
coming!" MS hype machine was in full bore.

First, it pushed people to install "Windows genuine advantage" with the
threat to withhold updates if it wasn't installed, or reported your copy
of windows was phony.

Next, it pushed people to install "Windows genuine advantage
notification", which would supposedly make the former tell the *user*
and not just Microsoft if it thought their windows were phony.

In actual fact, the "notification" thing had all kinds of side effects
and some sort of legal crud telling people they weren't permitted to
remove it once they'd installed it. One of the commonest side effects
was that WGA would "suddenly realize" that their copy was bogus. This
would stop updates being available to the user, but worse, it would
often force them to actually redo the "product activation", whereupon MS
would frequently refuse to cooperate on the grounds that their windows
copy was supposedly bogus. This often happened to people who had gotten
preloaded machines with Windows on and hadn't done any funny business.
It also did not happen to people who only installed the first of the two
"genuine advantage" thingies.

Moreover, the "notification" thing was NOT necessary to continue to
receive updates. Also, both were pushed as "critical" updates by Windows
Update, as if they were security patches to protect users from being
hacked. They weren't -- in fact, the "notifications" one, at least,
actually made users have *less* control over their machines, so if
anything there should have been a "critical update" to *remove* the
"notifications" update; I think I'd have recommended including it in the
next "malicious software removal tool" myself.

I found posts on multiple software-pundit, product-gripe, and similar
blogs all speculating that the real motive behind these bogus "critical
security fix" updates wasn't users' security, or even (a false sense of)
security for Microsoft's so-called "intellectual property", but in fact
to push people towards Vista. The "notifications" update created the
ability to remotely deactivate already-activated copies of Windows XP,
which otherwise would work until people changed their hardware sufficiently.

Apparently, Microsoft found the two or three year average replacement
time for peoples' PCs to be too slow and impatiently figured out a way
to force people to replace XP sooner than that, leveraging the existing
product activation.

It backfired. There was so much bad press that MS yanked most of the
"notifications" misfeatures in a later update and quit peddling it, and
decided to let people who were happy with their XP keep it until they
have new hardware after all.

But there is one way in which you are technically correct. The updates
didn't themselves explicitly push Vista. Although making XP stop working
and leaving users with no recourse except to buy a new copy of Windows,
even while XP is being swept off the shelves and Vista boxes lined up by
their hundreds, amounts to the same thing. Well, worse, actually.
Nagging about an update is common practise. The kind of arm-twisting
observed here is the special province of Microsoft, governments, and the
mob, as near as I can make out.

"John Ersatznom" <> wrote in message
news:emg9fv$t0s$...
> > Given that the FireFox 2.0 and Firefox 1.5 series are considered
> > different
> > products by Mozilla
>
> What Mozilla internaly considers them is irrelevant to the end user. The
> end user sees "Firefox version whatever". None of this is making any
> sense, anyway -- they could as well consider Firefox 1.4 and 1.5
> "different products", or even 2.0 and 2.0.0.1 "different products". That's
> just word-games.
>
>> Actually, yeah, your comparison is apt. Some people feel that 1.5 is
>> better than 2.X.
>
> That is illogical; 2.0 is a straight upgrade rather than a sidegrade.
> Firefox 1.5 is not to 2.0 as it is to Opera, or IE, which is what you seem
> to be claiming.

Are you twisted? I'm explaining to you why things are the way they are
now. You are free to argue that things *shouldn't* be that way, but that
doesn't change the fact that that's the way they are.

>>>but Firefox 1.x to 2.0 is a straight upgrade, and free, rather than a
>>>lateral move that costs money.
>>
>> People disagree with this assertion.
>
> What "people"?

http://listvine.com/2006/10/25/9-rea...to-firefox-20/
http://bluey.livejournal.com/116819.html
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp...&TopicId=10004
etc.

> There's a good reason why wikipedia would flag your article with "This
> article contains weasel words" if you'd written this there, you know...

Luckily this isn't Wikipedia.

- Oliver

Tim Slattery wrote:
> John Ersatznom <> wrote:
>
>> Mickey Segal wrote:
>>> "Oliver Wong" <> wrote in message
>>> news:2Jdih.125403$. ..
>>>
>>>> I've got JDK 1.5.0_06 and JDK 1.6.0, and the console doesn't work there
>>>> either.
>>>
>>> It sounds from this post on mozilla.support.firefox that this is something
>>> Sun needs to fix:
>> There is however something that Mozilla needs to fix. I got hit with a
>> double-dose of screwy behavior. My Firefox announced that there was a
>> new version available: 1.5.9. I canned the dialog since losing all my
>> open tabs at the time would have been inconvenient, and went manually to
>> mozilla.org later. I found that the latest version available was
>> actually 2.0.0.1, far later than 1.5.9! Here's hoping the 2.0.0.1
>> auto-update functionality is a bit smarter about detecting what the
>> latest version *really* is.
>
> The 1.* version never offered the upgrade to 2.* as an automatic
> upgrade, the way it does for the smaller "point" updates. Apparently
> Mozilla considers 1.* and 2.* to be separate applications.

No, it just regards 2.* as too radical for automatic update /at/ /present/.

--
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
-- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"

John W. Kennedy wrote:
> No, it just regards 2.* as too radical for automatic update /at/ /present/.

We're not talking about automatic update though. We're talking about
automatic update *notification*. Which the user then gets to act on, or
not, as they choose.

Telling the user that 2.x is now available and including an "[ ] I'm not
interested in Firefox 2, so don't tell me about it again" to use if they
really prefer 1.x would have worked nicely.

Oliver Wong wrote:
> Are you twisted?

Only when I'm playing Quake. Then I do things like shove opponents into
the lava to boil and scream rather than just snuff them out with my
rocket launcher. Otherwise...nah.

> I'm explaining to you why things are the way they are now. You are free
> to argue that things *shouldn't* be that way, but that doesn't change
> the fact that that's the way they are.

You seem to think that somehow that makes you "right" and me "wrong",
when it just means you're talking right past me for some reason.

>>There's a good reason why wikipedia would flag your article with "This
>>article contains weasel words" if you'd written this there, you know...
>
> Luckily this isn't Wikipedia.

ITYM "Unluckily". Unclear and weaselly debating tactics may make you
look clever or your opponent look stupid, but they don't actually alter
the facts being debated. Are you here to discuss factual matters or are
you here to win "points" by getting into debates and "winning"
arguments? If the latter, might I suggest alt.flame or some similar
group instead? Same goes for that fellow you were arguing for weeks with
at the start of this month. Nobody who helps clutter up a technical
group with 500+ offtopic articles in less than twenty days at an average
rate of around 1 an hour has won any "points" in my books. In fact,
nobody here is winning any "points" in my books at all. All that really
matters is the code, and what it does...in fact, I probably shouldn't
post anything after this to this digression about Firefox. Everyone's
missing the point anyway, it seems, including the Mozilla devs, which is
that update notification functionality that doesn't notify a user of new
versions of their stuff isn't doing its job. Apparently, nobody will
find out about some new Firefox versions that become available unless
they regularly visit their Web site. If they have to do that to remain
fully informed anyway, the whole purpose of having
auto-update-notification functionality in the product has been defeated.

'Nuff said on the topic.

Oliver Wong wrote:
> http://listvine.com/2006/10/25/9-rea...to-firefox-20/
> http://bluey.livejournal.com/116819.html
> http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp...&TopicId=10004
> etc.

OK, that wasn't quite my last word on the subject after all. I just got
around to checking these links, and the very first one gives me an error
page rather than any kind of content. I didn't even bother to try the
other two after seeing that.

If you really want to back up something in a debate with outside
references, it really doesn't look too good when it's obvious you didn't
even make sure the links you posted work, unless the thing you're trying
to prove is actually the fact that the link doesn't work, or that
there's such a thing as a 404 response code in HTTP, or something like
that.

There is now a bug report about this problem:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view...bug_id=6506635