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Perhaps consumers never warmed to a product whose main selling point involved "Steve Ballmer squirting at you."

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2...

I had the pleasure of having beer with Theo when he was in Edmonton, AB several years ago. He even refused to let me go to the ATM to grab cash; he bought the beer for me.

My only complaint about the guy was that he was way too smart, and I struggled to keep up with all the computing security things we discussed. Hardly the worst complaint to have about him :)

He just has zero patience for bullshit, and I think that's why people complain about his personality. If you ever get the opportunity to meet him in person, I believe you'd rethink this meme about him being an ass.

So you're effectively providing a high-profile case of the Greater Internet Fuckwad theory?

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/04/02/penny_arcades_greater_internet_fuckwad_theory/

We could learn off Amazon for our own computer file systems. A metadata/database filesystem where everything is stored all in one folder (rather than organized into directories) would save everyone so much time. The barcode would be replaced by 'tags' or metadata. Popular and recent tags could be accessible via a dropdown. Hunting for files, reorganization, deciding where to store files, becomes suddenly much easier.

More info:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/filesystem.html
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/01/19/filesystem_sacrilege/
http://dbfs.sourceforge.net/

You're not wrong..

Look what happened to the cover girl from O'Reilly's "Head First Design Patterns" book!

And theres reason number 2 linux will never take off, the fantastic community support, also explained here.

I think Freenet is penny-arcade's greater internet fuckwad theory as applied to pedophiles. The original link seems down but this site has a copy. In the original form it states: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad. There's not exactly many places pedos can flaunt their sexual preference publicly, so those that want to show off end up there. Most other people I'd think come to Freenet to stay private rather than the opposite. I gather that by "poking around" you mean informal surfing around for freesites and similar that wants to be found, not traffic analysis on the real volume of traffic.

It really boils down to one of two choices - can true anonymity be permitted or not, or does everything have to be pseudonymous? The latter means that it's all tracable, if you get a warrant from slashdot they'll have my IP and a warrant to my ISP will get my name and address (there's more complications than that, but I'll get to it) because it's all held in escrow. True anonymity means unlinkability - to prevent it means no Freenet, no open WiFi, no webcafe or WiFi without ID, no open relays or proxies or NAT or shell accounts or whatever, at least not unless you keep full logs. One thing is discussing what should be, but I think the burning question is "Given all the ways information can be encoded, relayed, split and merged, is it practically possible to prevent it?"

Anonymity is the absolute freedom of speech, which includes the infamous kiddie porn but also libel, slander, fraud, stock scams, spam, threats, medical records, fincnail records, criminal records, classified material and a host of other things that is and probably should be illegal. I doubt anyone that's really thought it through thinks it's ideal that ALL information flowed freely. The question is at what the ramficiations are for everyone else, if enforcing the law is worse than abolishing the law. For example it'd be trivial for me to post PGP messages here on slashdot, using an open medium to communicate anonymously. I don't think you could properly enforce it without banning "unapproved" encryption and turning it into a totalitarian state. And that price is too high.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic but I think the days when searches and warrants made the Internet a pseudonymous place is going to go away. Either we will have real anonymity through encryption and relays or we will have hard links to real identities. It's really better inbetween but I don't think we can ask the clock to be turned back any more than a failing corporation can...

"No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes; and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."

- Richard Burton, opening Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds musical

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/stuff/wowintro.mp3
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000025CO

Oh, it is an engineering problem, it's just a distinctly non-trivial engineering problem.

> Why do right-to-lifer's support the death penalty?

>> Because they believe in moral absolutism, which always breeds hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is the gap between normative and practised behavior. It might reduce ones credibility in some cases (e.g. Gore's jet-setting and his carbon-reduction message, or the Republican party's gay bashing and their own members' gay peccadillos), but in itself hypocrisy it's not a crime. You might find Neal Stephenson's thoughts on this illuminating.

As for right-to-lifers and the death penalty, there really is no dichotomy in arguing for the rights of the unborn on the one hand and arguing for stringent punishments for those convicted of heinous crimes. Anyone who says otherwise is playing with words (as are, to be fair, all those who reduce an abortion -- an emotionally scarring experience any way you look at it -- to glib phrases like "pro-life" and "pro-choice").

Fuck you.

fucking hypocrite ... jack shit ... amounts to jack shit ... Fuck you ... all that other shit

Plus, one should not forget to mention that they spent all that time redesigning their website without tables only to figure out that in order to get any of that neat stuff like, catalogs, forums, search results, product lists, address books, etc. you got to have tabular data,.i.e. TABLES.

No, most of us are smart enough to know which tool to use for which job. It's not CSS's fault if one person happens not to be.

Some of the links:

macedition.com
CSS sucks
CSS doesn't work anywhere any way consistently so why bother pushing its use? Point what doesn't work, tell web browser companies what they are doing wrong and beg/plead/demand they fix it.

Some idiot that can't tell the difference between a browser issue and a CSS issue.

soulthought.org
Okay...CSS sucks...well, browsers do, anyway...
I spent the entire weekend wasting my time trying to get a CSS-based three-panel layout to work properly. I finally digressed to a two-panel layout, and now it looks okay in IE and sucks in Mozilla Firebird. If you people would follow the standards, this would be easy!!!!!!

Someone who can tell the difference. Doesn't support the original site's flawed argument at all.

nuketown.com
When I re-designed Nuketown last year, I went to a CSS-only layout and I regret it; while the design works for the most part, there's really no way to make sure all three columns are automatically the same length (as is the case with tables). I have to resort to hacks

Misses the point of CSS.

fishbowl.pastiche.org
Cascading Style-Sheets Suck
I loathe CSS with a passion.
Correction. I loathe the fact that every web browser supports a different, incompatible subset of CSS2. W3C standards were supposed to save us from having to test pages in every single browser under the sun, but we're travelling at high speed in the opposite direction.

Someone who can tell the difference between the two issues but still wrote two titles damning CSS before acknowledging the real issue. Doesn't support any argument against CSS.

globalcoordinate.com
I'm sorry but I think that the designers of the CSS stylesheet spec should be shot. Why does simple layout have to such a black art?

Hmmm.

/* double, double, toil and trouble */
#left {
float: left; /* fire burn and caldron bubble */
width: 15%;
}
/* macbeth! macbeth! macbeth! */
#middle {
margin: 0 16% 0 16%; /* to be replaced with eye of newt */
}
#right {
float: right;
width: 15%;
}

And finally, Barry:

barry.pearson.name
CSS positioning is so fragile that I can publish simple material, conforming to specifications published many years ago, and not have a clue about what people "out there" can see or not see. It isn't just about whether it has the intended colour. It might not appear at the right place on the page. It might not appear at all!

That's a link to a browser bug, Barry you big failure.
More from Barry:

There is a mention of something resembling page layout in the CSS2 Recommendation. "9.6.1 Fixed positio

FUD is rated as interesting?

This is why I left /. for digg.

\. is proof of the internet fuckwad theory.

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/04/02/penny_arca des_greater_internet_fuckwad_theory

XML is not the answer. It is not even the question. To paraphrase Jamie Zawinski on regular expressions, "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use XML." Now they have two problems."
-- Phillip J. Eby

Granted, he was talking about Python, not PHP... but still...

If your weblog server implements ETag and Last-Modified, my spider can send a one packet request with the values I last saw from you, and you can send a one packet 304 response if nothing has changed.

Charles Miller explained this well a few years ago.

(I run the spiders at Technorati).

I was beginning to doubt that Harmony would ever get out of the starting gate, but with IBM cracking the whip, maybe they have a chance.

There has been some backlash over the way the Harmony project is being managed, some of it kinder than others.

Personally, I agree with Charles Miller - start the project with some working code. down the road, you may have to refactor, but that's a part of software development.

Mod parent up. Whatever it is, it should pass The 15 Minute Test. Some developers may look at it in their spare time and there aren't a lot with enough patience to sift an hour through documentation before starting.

Close enough to be a dupe? You Decide.

Nevertheless, this is not an issue, but like the unwashed shrills squawking that the end of Social Security is nigh, RSS is far from being dead. The issue is that ignorant (maybe I should say 'stupid') people did not bother to implement the spec properly in their RSS reader code. I'm not talking about the RSS spec, but the HTML spec. This is a simple two step process (credit Charles Miller):

1. When you first pull your RSS feed, store the values you get for Last-modified ( = A) and ETag (= B).
2. When you want to next poll your feed, send If-Modified-Since: A and If-None-Match: B.

If the RSS feed has not been updated since you last polled, you will get a 304: Not Modified in response, but no RSS feed (because it has not changed, duh).

It's like in The Army, you know--The Great Prince issues commands, founds states, vests families with fiefs. Inferior people should not be employed (creating broken RSS readers).

Everybody writing an RSS client or server script should read this and make it one of their main priorities.

I imagine even more bandwidth could be saved if the next version of the RSS or ATOM standards mandated rsync support.

To some extent, this could be blamed on the feed itself. Ideally, it works like this..

When you request the feed, you first get sent your normal HTTP header. If properly configured, it will return a 304 if you have the most recent version -- however, as many feeds are generated in PHP[1], this header is defaulted off, and you'll end up with your standard 200, or go ahead, code. This single handedly wastes a metric tonne of bandwidth needlessly.

Even if you're trying to rape a feed, you'll only be wasting a few hundred bytes at most every half hour, than the whole 50K or whatnot size it is.

See here for a more detailed explanation.

[1] This is not a PHP specific issue; a lot of dynamic content, and even static content, fails to do this properly. But this is what it's there for, after all.

It's called a Conditional GET.

--
Mando

Or maybe something like this.

Someone did a nice write-up about doing so back in 2002.

"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."

Surely that's not right? I don't recall seeing that in the book and nor can I imagine Arthur Dent saying "flashlight". Surely he'd have said "torch"?

Is it possible the publishers did a translation for the US market?

Ahh: These links (a, and b) tend to agree with me.

There are facilities for doing this, e.g. conditional HTTP gets, although as far as I know, they might not be very wide implemented yet, especially on the client side. See, for example, some dude's blog entry on conditional HTTP gets for RSS.

The point is, solutions are out there. Hopefully, as RSS becomes more widely-deployed, people will implement this sort of thing to keep things working smoothly.

I believe that, coming out of the whole NeXT tradition that invented the web browser, OmniWeb used a real SGML engine to parse the HTML applications that are called web pages, as you could tell by reading the status bar as pages loaded (SGMLObject parsing, or something; I've since updated to OW 4.5, with WebCore). True, this engine had trouble with many pages--that is, it did not accept as liberally as it could have--but I think that the twists and contortions that people put HTML through would have made even Jon Postel hang his head in shame.

The people who invented HTTP came up with something even better. HTTP allows you to say to a server in a single query: "If this document has changed since I last looked at it, give me the new version. If it hasn't just tell me it hasn't changed and give me nothing." This mechanism is called "Conditional GET", and it would reduce 90% of those significant 24,000 byte queries into really trivial 200 byte queries.

Slashdot's RSS feed is 2.51KB at the time of writing. The largest feed I subscribe to is 10K - after decompression. We're talking very little bandwidth here. Not to mention that the aggregator uses Conditional GETs so if there isn't an update you only transfer maybe 200-300 bytes of header.

RSS is just XML over HTTP folks. No special magic needed.

Most RRS feeds are generated by some kind of script. Most of the time the script can manually set the HTTP header so you get stuff like.

*Cache like (Squid, etc)
*HTTP Conditional GETs
Save bandwidth and speed up download times with intelligent use of Last-Modified and ETag. See HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers

Most RSS readers support HTTP's Conditional GET mechanism, which only downloads the full file if the modified date in the header is different than your last version. This means you can check for updates with tiny (~200byte) requests. For more info, see HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers.