Slashdot Mirror
Worst Bug or Shortcomings in a Standard?
Alastair asks: "Just curious what the Slashdot crowd thinks are the worst bugs ever to creep into a standard? For mine, the various security vulnerabilities in WEP would make the grade. Also perhaps the lack of a protocol field in HDLC, and which most implementations added in a non-compatible way. I'm thinking here about bugs which result in partial or total irrelevance of the standard itself, as opposed to just a lack of interest in adopting it."
I wish there was a way to install programs common accross all versions of linux.
/tmp or the installer will dump core. After the installer is done, edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and add a section called "GL" and put "driver nv" in it. Make sure you have the latest version of X and Linux kernel 2.6 or else X will segfault when you start. OK, run the Quake 3 installer and make sure you set the proper group and setuid permissions on quake3.bin. If you want sound, look here [link to another obscure web site], which is a short HOWTO on how to get sound in Quake 3. That's all there is to it!"
Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues. Example comments:
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?"
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin, then do chmod +x on the file. Then you have to su to root, make sure you type export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 but ONLY if you have that latest libc6 installed. If you don't, don't set that environment variable or the installer will dump core. Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?"
Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.
Most people don't call it a "bug" but I do; the operator overloading of '+', '+=' and '=' in the Java specification's String class.
Why is this a bug? Because the creators of the standard explicitely denounce operator overloading yet they do it anyway for this exception. Operator overloading is explicitely not possible in Java... except this one time.
If it is so incredibly useful in this particular case that they would bend the specification for it, can't they understand that it would be useful for other classes (ie. Matrix classes or even the standard Number classes) too?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Mirc file transfer sends data in packets, and waits for an ack for each packet.
Over tcp.
TCP of course already does this, and this just makes sending files very very slow. It should have just sent it as a single stream.
It should have been female connectors with only one pinout (e.g DCE) on all equipment supporting RS232, and all RS232 cables should be crossed (null modems).
Instead we have a complete mess with male and female connectors, straight and crossed cables. Is pin 2 receive or transmit? Dohhh.
Why female connectors on boxes? Male connectors are more fragile. If the pins break, replace (or repair) the cable. The female connector on the box is OK.
Luckily, RS232 are dying ;-)
RFC1925
I compare modern linux (slackware 10) to windows 98 because that's what I can get on my budget.
I am trolling
A current example would be packing VC-1 into both Blu-ray and HD DVD.
Though software patents are currently only a problem in the U.S., I'd still say that they threat of stealth patents would be the worst bug. Proprietary material shouldn't get through the standards process.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
It was a de facto standard to use two digits to encode the year, which caused a lot of fun a few years ago.
With the space available on a CD, they should have allowed space for Artist / Album / Songname / etc on the disk itself.
See the HTML 4.0 recommendation. I literally hit something when I first read this back in '97 (yes, I sometimes read standards documents and RFC's for fun
Remember that HTML is a markup language, and see above where the W3C intentionally took away contextual information from the document.
Keep in mind this was *after* the release of CSS1 (Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 W3C Recommendation 17 Dec 1996 vs. HTML 4.0 Specification W3C Recommendation 18-Dec-1997)
99% of websites on the planet have something you could consider a "menu", or "tabs" of some kind. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a particular tag for that, like "<menu>"? (we do
Nowadays, lots of people are linking to other people (a <dir>ectory) of people with blogrolls, wouldn't it be nice to wrap those in a <dir> list and style them separately, without using arbitrary <ul class="blah"> tags? Or perhaps a list of files available for download (<dir>), or a list of (perhaps) emails in a web mailing client.
Not that there's anything preventing use of ad-hoc class tags to achieve the same effect, but there is semantic information (especially in <menu>) that can be put to good use when standardized like this. Everybody complains about screen-readers, wrap / auto-skip anything in a menu tag. Make a special button that pops up (or reads) anything in a <menu>. Grr. The web could have been just a tiny bit better without that move by the W3C.
--Robert
Yes, XML has been overhyped. Yes, it is used in many places where it's not appropriate. But it's completely unfair to tar an entire language and suite of associated technologies because of the way it's abused. Is Flash an inferior product because there are idiots who put loud, bloated Flash intros on their websites when a nice compact CSS-based splash page would do?
A lot of people (notably on Slashdot) have the notion that when it comes to data XML is verbose and redundant with existing data formats and programming languages, and that when it comes to text XML is overkill because good ol' ASCII is all you need. Well, if the only things in the world that ever needed archiving, searching, and retrieval were highly structured data and Usenet news posts those would be defensible opinions. But those aren't the only things in the world. There is a huge, huge amount of content that consists of heterogenous mixtures of strictly typed data, free-form data, and text in various languages (including the languages of mathematics, of music, of graphics...). As of 2005, there's no better format with which to store it and process it than XML.
Do a Google search on /'digital library' XML/ or try /XML site:loc.gov/ for example. And if you ever talk to anyone who's done serious programming for the kind of projects you'll find mentioned there, you'll discover they have skills that incommensurate with those of the people who put "XML" on their resume because they once used xsltproc to generate simple HTML output from a simple XSLT stylesheet. And believe it or not, some hiring officials are able to tell the difference. (Speaking as one who spent a good chunk of the last couple months looking at code samples submitted by applicants for one of those positions.)
Sorry, but I've had it with knee-jerk XML bashing.
Any simple and standard text-based markup language for data encoding with several free parsers available would probably have been just as overhyped as XML.
Numerous other formats performing the same role as XML exist, but they never got the hype because they either weren't a standard, didn't have available parsers, weren't simple, etc., etc.
What nutjob actually thought XML is easy to read?
I think it's easy to read! It's a hell of a lot easier to read than RTF, Postscript. Or consider Sendmail configuration files. Ick! While not as readable as traditional dot.ini files, it's a heck of a lot more flexible.
If you can read HTML you can read XML.
And what is the difference between a node an an attribute?
What's the difference between a person and a trait? It's the same difference. Traits describe people, and attributes describe nodes. Think of nodes as nouns and attributes as adjectives. If a node is the name of an image file, then the attributes could be the image format, size, description, etc.
Of course, like natural language, distinctions can be difficult to make. Is an email address a node or an attribute? But don't sweat stuff like this, because no one cares.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!