It's my computer, I want to do whatever I want to it, whenever I want to, and I don't want any privilege issues getting in my way... why shouldn't I run as admin on my own home PC if I want to?
The issue isn't what you want to run on your computer, it's what other people want to run on your computer. If you're running as root, and someone can con you into running an executable (which is easier than you probably think, just look at the junk people double click every day), you've just given that process full control over your machine. It can do anything up to and including deleting every last thing on your hard drive. Running with limited privileges limits the damage such a rogue program can do to your system.
If by "the computers I go to" you mean that you shuttle between several different PCs and can't guarantee what's installed on them, just throw OpenOffice Portable onto a USB memory stick and carry it with you. Then you know you have an ODF reader at hand at all times.
You can almost hear the sound of the vacuum created by bloggers thinking that their words matter when the people with control don't even know how to read the tubes.
I'm not saying that all blogs can have this kind of impact. TPM succeeded because they did the hard work of unearthing the story and keeping it alive when nobody else cared about it; most bloggers do it for fun and don't have that level of commitment. But it's silly to make sweeping generalizations dismissing the impact blogs can have when the evidence to the contrary is all around us.
What companies like Google don't realize is that it's the uncertainty that kills customers.
What you don't realize is that, from Google's perspective, you're not the customer.
Google wants to data-mine the Web to better sell ads. Convincing sites to run their analytics through Google's hosted solution gives them a gold mine of data to use for this purpose.
In other words, the stats software is just bait that they can use to get people to provide data they can use to better serve their real customers -- the people who buy ads on Google's network.
Back when you were dealing with Urchin, you were the customer in a straightforward transaction of money-for-software. But those days are over, unfortunately.
You just have to look at it from programmer's point of view.
That's the definition of "not intuitive". Something is "intuitive" when you can pick it up and use it without having to think. If you have to think about how to use it, it's not intuitive.
(There's an old saying that makes the point: the only truly intuitive interface is the nipple. All others are learned.)
In the meantime, reports are that the Windows version of the downloader runs fine under Wine. And the only thing you need the downloader for is for full albums, Linux users can buy singles today straight from their browser, no downloader required.
With this offering, Amazon has done more to make Linux a first-class citizen in the online music space than maybe any other company to date. That's hardly "lock[ing] out Linux users."
I know it's pointless to ask things like this of the/. "editors", but the summary of this story is almost completely useless to anyone who is coming to the story cold (like me).
Would it have killed someone to have rewritten the submission so that it explained:
Who MediaDefender is
What the "leaked MediaDefender emails" are
What the "MiiVi story" is
Why I should care
?
I can go Google all that stuff and find out for myself, but why would I bother, if it's not clear to me why the story is important in the first place?
I'm no expert but I wouldn't expect a big performance boost from upgrading from DDR to DDR2. Memory performance in general isn't the bottleneck in a typical desktop system; memory CAPACITY might be, but if you have 2GB already that's not the issue.
If you're looking for an easy speed boost, a new motherboard plus a new CPU would be the way to go; CPU performance has been increasing dramatically lately. Here's a chart from THG that illustrates the progress; even the mid-range Core 2 Duos benchmark at 2-3 times the performance of an Athlon 3000+, and the high-end Core 2s are even faster. That's a much more dramatic performance boost than anything you'd see by upgrading your RAM.
This is nothing. If you want to read a story of true Epic Failure in Web Hosting, you should go read up on LeafyHost -- the world's only web host to be founded and then completely melted down over the course of a 100-page Ars Technica discussion thread.
There are so many laugh-out-loud moments in that thread I can't recommend it highly enough.
(If the idea of reading a 100 page thread is daunting to you, you can read summaries of the LeafyHost debacle here and here. But really, do yourself a favor and read the thread.
Why should you have Find in two different places, depending on which key you hit to invoke it? Find is Find, innit?
Firefox used to do the same thing (Ctrl+F opened a Find dialog, / opened inline search in the browser chrome) but in recent versions they have sensibly unified these into one single inline search interface.
First iPods are rather cheap and can be considered an impulse buy for Middle Middle class-Wealthy people for Poor- Lower Middle Class an iPod Shuffle would be at christmas gift.
Being that they are in these price ranges a lot of people are using these and realize they like they way that Apple does things.
"Rather cheap"? Are you kidding? Apple's offerings in the MP3/media player space are always priced notably higher than feature-equivalent devices from other manufacturers. The price disparity hasn't hurt them any since they make up for it in style (the cheaper devices are universally fugly and sport brain-wounding UIs).
There's a lot of reasons for the success of the iPod, but being the cheapest ain't one of them.
Next thing you know, Dvorak will come out with a sensible and non-stupid article on Macs, and at that point I drop technology altogether and start farming for a living.
The whole point of a semantic tag is that it is machine parsable. A script that is interpreting the page will know what parts of the page is the article, which parts are the navigation, which parts are the advertisements, and so on.
But you don't need new tags for that. You could just come up with a standardized list of attributes for common uses. XHTML2 uses a new attribute, "role", to accomplish this, for example. So the standard defined a list of common ROLEs (like, say, "role=navigation" or "role=advertisement"), you could have, say:
... and get the same effect as an ADVERTISEMENT tag, and at the same time make it easier to extend the list of defined elements in the future (since you could just extend the list of ROLEs, and not have to re-do the whole spec).
The HTML WG is considering a similar mechanism, only using the CLASS attribute instead of ROLE. Personally I think that's a bad idea, since CLASS carries style information, not semantic information, and there's probably already a ton of documents out there using, say,
<div class="navigation">
... and their owners are gonna be really surprised when browsers suddenly start parsing those classes in new and unexpected ways.
There are currently to Working Groups in the W3C working on markup -- the XHTML working group, and the HTML working group. These are separate entities with separate memberships and separate processes.
XHTML was originally intended to be the successor to HTML. But a couple of things that happened after XHTML1 "shipped" caused that to be re-evaluated:
The whole point of XHTML was that moving to XML syntax would open up new possibilities for user-agents: not just browsers (whose lives would be simplified by not having to deal with "tag soup" anymore"), but applications that would take advantage of already knowing XML to do cool stuff with the web. Only that never really happened; and because Microsoft wasn't on board, browser vendors still had to parse the "tag soup" anyway.
The XHTML Working Group went off the deep end and announced that XHTML2 would handle errors the way XML parsers are supposed to: by shutting down and throwing up an "Non-conforming document" error. Needless to say, this is not how the Web works today, and it threw a scare into millions of Web publishers who incorporate third-party content that they have no control over (like, say, ads) in their sites. They also proposed major changes to the syntax of XHTML2 versus XHTML1 to clean it up and make it more logical; which sounds great until you realize that now you have to teach those millions of web publishers a whole new syntax or their sites break.
When it became clear that continuing down the XHTML path promised tons of heartburn for publishers and user-agent developers without much reward in return, people started thinking that maybe rebooting the HTML specification process wouldn't be such a bad thing. The W3C picked up the WHATWG's independent "HTML5" spec as a starting point, and that's where we are today: XHTML is for people who are comfortable with radical changes between versions of the spec and Draconian error processing; HTML is for people who want backwards compatibility and less strict parsing.
I dunno about that. If the primary concern was book sales, he'd have been better off preserving the anonymity until the book was actually on the shelves. When "Primary Colors" (a thinly veiled account of the 1992 Clinton campaign -- the book's main character, "Jack Stanton", is a doughnut-gobbling Southern governor running for President) came out, it was credited simply to "Anonymous" -- which led the media to speculate for weeks about which Clinton insider had spilled the beans. By the time it was revealed that "Anonymous" wasn't really a Clinton insider but rather Time magazine reporter Joe Klein, the sales of the book had gone through the roof, fueled by all that media speculation. One would think the same would be true of a Fake Steve book, if it were teasingly credited to "Anonymous" as well.
I hate Arial with a passion, and wish my Mac would substitute Helvetica, since Arial was actually designed as a Helvetica clone that cost less to license. Verdana was designed to be legible on low-resolution displays. Displays have higher resolutions now, and font rendering technologies have improved. Verdana has outlived its usefulness. Courier New is just plain ugly. I want my fixed-pitch text rendered in Monaco.
Good news! You can have the Web this way right now. (At least, you can if you're using Firefox; Safari probably has a similar feature, but I don't use it so I can't guarantee that.)
Go to Firefox preferences panel
Choose "Content" tab
Under "Fonts & Colors", click "Advanced"
Choose the fonts you want to use everywhere: in your case, Helvetica for sans serif faces, and Monaco for proportional
Uncheck the box labeled "Allow sites to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"
Click "OK" button
Now the Web will be rendered in exactly the fonts you specified, and you never have to be offended by the sight of Arial again:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Conspiracy theorists will take note that there is a tag for inserting Silverlight elements into your Facebook app in FB's pseudo-HTML markup language, FBML. The only other formats to receive this support (inserting rich content with a single tag) are Flash and MP3.
The issue isn't what you want to run on your computer, it's what other people want to run on your computer. If you're running as root, and someone can con you into running an executable (which is easier than you probably think, just look at the junk people double click every day), you've just given that process full control over your machine. It can do anything up to and including deleting every last thing on your hard drive. Running with limited privileges limits the damage such a rogue program can do to your system.
Obviously the standard is fun-per-dollar-generated-for-Nolan-Bushnell:
So obviously Pong was the best game ever. You can't argue with science!
Yeah, Valve hired Chet and Erik of the hilarious and much-missed Old Man Murray (remember them?) to do the writing for Portal, and it shows.
If by "the computers I go to" you mean that you shuttle between several different PCs and can't guarantee what's installed on them, just throw OpenOffice Portable onto a USB memory stick and carry it with you. Then you know you have an ODF reader at hand at all times.
And yet Josh Marshall and his blog Talking Points Memo managed to break the U.S. attorney firing scandal -- a scandal that ultimately led to the removal of the Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in the U.S. This despite the fact that the AG's boss hardly knows how to read, much less to read the "tubes".
I'm not saying that all blogs can have this kind of impact. TPM succeeded because they did the hard work of unearthing the story and keeping it alive when nobody else cared about it; most bloggers do it for fun and don't have that level of commitment. But it's silly to make sweeping generalizations dismissing the impact blogs can have when the evidence to the contrary is all around us.
It would be awesome to not be able to use Spell Check in MS Word until you "unlock" it by typing 1,000,000 characters.
What you don't realize is that, from Google's perspective, you're not the customer.
Google wants to data-mine the Web to better sell ads. Convincing sites to run their analytics through Google's hosted solution gives them a gold mine of data to use for this purpose.
In other words, the stats software is just bait that they can use to get people to provide data they can use to better serve their real customers -- the people who buy ads on Google's network.
Back when you were dealing with Urchin, you were the customer in a straightforward transaction of money-for-software. But those days are over, unfortunately.
Seriously, that's the complete list these days as far as I can tell. Not good news for Microsoft.
That's the definition of "not intuitive". Something is "intuitive" when you can pick it up and use it without having to think. If you have to think about how to use it, it's not intuitive.
(There's an old saying that makes the point: the only truly intuitive interface is the nipple. All others are learned.)
Avoid.
Oh come on now.
With this offering, Amazon has done more to make Linux a first-class citizen in the online music space than maybe any other company to date. That's hardly "lock[ing] out Linux users."
New here?
I know it's pointless to ask things like this of the /. "editors", but the summary of this story is almost completely useless to anyone who is coming to the story cold (like me).
Would it have killed someone to have rewritten the submission so that it explained:
?
I can go Google all that stuff and find out for myself, but why would I bother, if it's not clear to me why the story is important in the first place?
I'm no expert but I wouldn't expect a big performance boost from upgrading from DDR to DDR2. Memory performance in general isn't the bottleneck in a typical desktop system; memory CAPACITY might be, but if you have 2GB already that's not the issue.
If you're looking for an easy speed boost, a new motherboard plus a new CPU would be the way to go; CPU performance has been increasing dramatically lately. Here's a chart from THG that illustrates the progress; even the mid-range Core 2 Duos benchmark at 2-3 times the performance of an Athlon 3000+, and the high-end Core 2s are even faster. That's a much more dramatic performance boost than anything you'd see by upgrading your RAM.
This is nothing. If you want to read a story of true Epic Failure in Web Hosting, you should go read up on LeafyHost -- the world's only web host to be founded and then completely melted down over the course of a 100-page Ars Technica discussion thread.
There are so many laugh-out-loud moments in that thread I can't recommend it highly enough.
(If the idea of reading a 100 page thread is daunting to you, you can read summaries of the LeafyHost debacle here and here. But really, do yourself a favor and read the thread.
)Why should you have Find in two different places, depending on which key you hit to invoke it? Find is Find, innit?
Firefox used to do the same thing (Ctrl+F opened a Find dialog, / opened inline search in the browser chrome) but in recent versions they have sensibly unified these into one single inline search interface.
You don't have to post anonymously, Senator Craig...
"Rather cheap"? Are you kidding? Apple's offerings in the MP3/media player space are always priced notably higher than feature-equivalent devices from other manufacturers. The price disparity hasn't hurt them any since they make up for it in style (the cheaper devices are universally fugly and sport brain-wounding UIs).
There's a lot of reasons for the success of the iPod, but being the cheapest ain't one of them.
Blogger/Blogspot (a Google service) was out for the better part of half a day last week. Even Google f's things up sometimes.
Might be time for you to head down to the farm supply store! ;-)
But you don't need new tags for that. You could just come up with a standardized list of attributes for common uses. XHTML2 uses a new attribute, "role", to accomplish this, for example. So the standard defined a list of common ROLEs (like, say, "role=navigation" or "role=advertisement"), you could have, say:
... and get the same effect as an ADVERTISEMENT tag, and at the same time make it easier to extend the list of defined elements in the future (since you could just extend the list of ROLEs, and not have to re-do the whole spec).
The HTML WG is considering a similar mechanism, only using the CLASS attribute instead of ROLE. Personally I think that's a bad idea, since CLASS carries style information, not semantic information, and there's probably already a ton of documents out there using, say,
... and their owners are gonna be really surprised when browsers suddenly start parsing those classes in new and unexpected ways.
Yes. Kind of.
There are currently to Working Groups in the W3C working on markup -- the XHTML working group, and the HTML working group. These are separate entities with separate memberships and separate processes.
XHTML was originally intended to be the successor to HTML. But a couple of things that happened after XHTML1 "shipped" caused that to be re-evaluated:
When it became clear that continuing down the XHTML path promised tons of heartburn for publishers and user-agent developers without much reward in return, people started thinking that maybe rebooting the HTML specification process wouldn't be such a bad thing. The W3C picked up the WHATWG's independent "HTML5" spec as a starting point, and that's where we are today: XHTML is for people who are comfortable with radical changes between versions of the spec and Draconian error processing; HTML is for people who want backwards compatibility and less strict parsing.
I dunno about that. If the primary concern was book sales, he'd have been better off preserving the anonymity until the book was actually on the shelves. When "Primary Colors" (a thinly veiled account of the 1992 Clinton campaign -- the book's main character, "Jack Stanton", is a doughnut-gobbling Southern governor running for President) came out, it was credited simply to "Anonymous" -- which led the media to speculate for weeks about which Clinton insider had spilled the beans. By the time it was revealed that "Anonymous" wasn't really a Clinton insider but rather Time magazine reporter Joe Klein, the sales of the book had gone through the roof, fueled by all that media speculation. One would think the same would be true of a Fake Steve book, if it were teasingly credited to "Anonymous" as well.
Good news! You can have the Web this way right now. (At least, you can if you're using Firefox; Safari probably has a similar feature, but I don't use it so I can't guarantee that.)
Now the Web will be rendered in exactly the fonts you specified, and you never have to be offended by the sight of Arial again :-)