Besides, the book is not very complete. I perused the table of contents, but I couldn't find the section on making table based website templates anywhere. How are we supposed to make three column pages without tables?
I can see a case for throttling or traffic shaping in certain environments, especially for ISPs providing domestic lines. I really have no problem with an ISP that throttles down latency tolerant traffic like bittorrent so that everybody else on the network can use latency-sensitive applications like telephony.
Problem is, most ISPs that do this aren't straightforward about it. That is just lying.
The small business I work for provides short term student accommodation (universities here in Belgium don't have dorms like in the States, private companies or student associations organize housing). In one of our residences, 20 students in downloaded 1.2 terabytes in the month of July. The volume causes all kinds of trouble for me as the IT guy because our ISP is perpetually threatening to cut us off if we don't upgrade to $superExpensivePlanOfTheMonth. We all know here that the overwhelming majority of this traffic is p2p.
In other words, I am very sensitive to anti-piracy arguments because I have felt the pain of dealing with it. I have toyed with the idea of putting some sort of traffic shaping technology between the students and the net or limiting their access, but ultimately I have decided to put up with the headache.
This is why: Students need freedom to grow, even if they abuse it at times (or even most of the time). If I implement traffic shaping or limit bandwidth, that one CS student who uses bittorrent to distribute his project will be screwed out of an education, and the world might be screwed out of a really cool innovation. That one aspiring film maker won't be able to distribute the movie that will make her famous and change the world of art. Sooner or later all of those students will be paying for their own bandwidth and they will learn the lesson about how their abuse is hurting the rest of us, but never again in their lives will they have the opportunities to create and learn that they have now, and unfettered access to the net is part of that.
I cannot imagine any kind of traffic control that will not pose these kinds of problems. If we allow schools to shape bandwidth, the quality of the education they offer will suffer. I hope that US universities stand up for what is right on this one.
I just did a search for my company, one under the company's name, "Langues Vivantes", and one under one of the keywords we would like to place well in, "languages abroad". In both cases we were the first result on the second page. In google, our company's name is first for users in our country, Belgium, and our SEO keywords don't place very well at all.
You know what this tells me?
Our company is fairly large, so it is very reasonable that people in Belgium looking for our name would see us on the first page. Google does this better.
Our half-assed attempts to capture a couple of key word searches don't work in Google, but they work in Cuil. Cuil is therefore vulnerable to SEO spam.
As for the quality of their index, in both of the searches the little thumbnail cuil puts next to my page was not on my site. In the second case, it was a competitor's logo. The text sample in the search result was on my site, but not on the page Cuil linked to.
The fact that the search results do not line up horizontally makes the page hard to read systematically, but that might be on purpose
In other words, it is search engine that has a hard time finding relevant results, is vulnerable to spam, and has a confused index.
You don't tell the police that they are being filmed. You just quietly film them, and when they do something inappropriate you give the tape to the local TV station and sue the department into the ground. This strategy has three advantages. First, it will be a hell of a lot harder for the DA to charge you with wiretapping when you are a local celebrity. Second, you might get something for your trouble.
Finally, and most importantly, it will force the police to behave as if they were being filmed all of the time because they just won't know who that one tinfoil hat dude is until they are being fired for beating him.
I get so sick of this debate. This is US data from the 1950's, it makes sense to present it in the manner that it was measured. We're not talking ells here. Is it really that hard to divide by 3? Is it that hard to look up a fathom?
There is nothing inherently superior about the metric system. Why does dividing by 10 matter so much, anyway? Because you have 10 fingers? Really, we should be trying to move to a system of measure that is base 2.
I disagree. I do the IT for a small business, and I love what I do. There are aspects that I don't enjoy, especially as far as managing hardware and user support are concerned, but usually it is just downright interesting. I have had the chance to learn a few programming languages and write a couple of specialized applications, which I loved. Aside from the fact that I learn something new every day, besides the fact that every new job is an interesting puzzle, the decisions I make have a real impact on the direction of the business and the well-being its employees, and the feedback from a job well done is immediate and sincere.
On the other hand, I know people who would die of frustration in my job: there is no direction from higher and you have to write your own job description on a monthly basis.
I think the IT industry is like any other: you need to find the company with a corporate culture that is right for you. If you like independence, you work for a place like mine. If you like structure, you get a job with one of the bigger code factories. Once you have found the right place, you will like what you do.
And of course such a program would be pointless anyway. If 'Designed For Windows' apps don't work under Wine then Wine itself has failed its objective.
IIRC, Wine's objective is to give software vendors a set of libraries to compile their Windows software against so that it will run under Linux, not necessarily run all windows software natively in Linux. The idea is that if it is so simple to do, people like Adobe will release a Linux version of Photoshop compiled against Wine.
So actually, getting products to say that they are "compatible with Wine 1.0" is the goal. That is also the reason that they are releasing: it gives vendors a stable branch to work with.
I would really like to try out Wine, but I couldn't find the WinXP version on the site, which is strange because usually open source apps get ported over really quickly. I tried installing the source tarball in CYGWIN, but no avail. Anybody know where I can get the Win32 binaries?
You select your version with the GET variables.
So, for other OS's:
Linux: change os=win to os=linux
Mac: change os=win to os=osx
For other languages, you can substitute the language variable such as en-GB for British English, de for German and fr for French. Not all of them are up right now, but they will be soon.
I might just be getting old, but I think that music today is less compelling than it was 10 or even 5 years ago. Seriously, music today is crap. The drop probably has more to do with people not wanting big label music even if they can get it for free over the internet.
Of course, it should be noted that one percent is much smaller than the sampling error for this kind of thing, so for all we know it could have gone up.
"Wtf are you talking about? How much does a budget PC with Linux and sendmail/postfix cost for christ sake?"
That doesn't do shared calendaring, like an exchange server or Google Apps. Besides, its not the cost of hardware, its the staff that counts. If you have your own server, you need to have people on hand who can administer it. I have a one year contract, and when I am done the company should be able to operate with little or no input from people like me.
"Incidentaly , how will your business function on those occasions you lose your net access"
That happened not too long ago. Our service provider got into a fight with its backbone provider and we lost the net for a week. Being on line saved our butts. If we had implemented your solution, we would have lost one of the year's best weeks in sales because both the email server and the website's interface with our customer DB would have been down. We simply forwarded the phones to our private cells and worked from home. We used google chat to cross talk. It was one of the most productive weeks we have ever had... so much so that if it was not necessary to actually meet clients in an office, and give a little supervisory oversight to the interns, we might scrap it all together.
Otherwise, we make nightly backups of our online DB should our hosting service ever go under like our service provider did.
First, IE 7's javascript engine is vastly fixed over what they offered before. I am afraid I am going to have to call shill on this one. I am sure that you remember that acid3 tests ECMAScript compliance.
Trident (ie7): 13
Trident (ie6): 6
Gecko: 75
Opera and Safari are of course, disqualified as they hacked together 100 scores.
I tinker with JS a bit, and things like attaching event listeners, getting first children, getting attributes, getting values, getting the URL, basically everything DOM related has to be treated differently in IE.
Worse, XMLHttpRequest, the very core of AJAX, is broken in IE7, but not IE6.
I am sorry, but you are wrong on that count.
I guess if you call horrible to slightly less horrible an improvement, this is a good thing.
Visual Studio 2008 works extremely well for creating AJAX enabled content that works cross-browser, without rolling all your own client code. Oh, it becomes clear. Microsoft wants to make it impossible to implement your own JS solution so that you have to buy into their development tools to build a site that works. What a surprise.
Third, Silverlight is not an IE/Windows only platform. It is, however, a Windows only platform. Moonlight is still vaporware, last I heard.
And if you really think they're going to try that bait and switch tactic again, you're nuts. MS is not that stupid. They actually want Silverlight to be valid and compete with Flash. What makes you say that?
But why am I arguing? I should be asking for examples of where MS is doing as you suggest they will. I cannot give examples of events that have yet to transpire. The company's history is well known.
NEVER You almost had a good argument until you used a superlative. Google Apps for domains is clearly superior to Outlook/Exchange* for small businesses, for example. SugarCRM and other web-based application customer management systems such as pyrameed are at at least as good as solutions such as SAP for up to medium sized businesses. Web based apps offer:
easier administration for both systems as a whole and the client machines
world wide access
real-time collaboration
Our business runs entirely on web-based applications except for MS word, and like I said, google docs is getting there. The net is only getting faster and I can't image a single advantage of client-side software for business administration. Applications like photoshop and autocad will probably remain local for years to come, but that is a pretty small niche in the overall scheme of things.
*: somebody always counters this with "but you don't control the server!!!1!" Look, no small business has its own mail server. Google's is just as secure as Joe Blows ISP.
Microsoft knows that web applications will soon threaten their client-side sales model. They also know that places like Google have enough of a head start in the AJAX world that they will never catch up (tried google apps lately? It is really getting there, especially if you do a lot of collaborative work). This is why IE's javascript standards compliancy still sucks balls even though its CSS support isn't bad: they want to make life hard for people trying to develop in AJAX.
Now they are trying to develop proprietary technologies to compete: Silverlight and this new ARAX bull will replace Flash and AJAX. They will release some shit-hot developer tools that make it really easy to build shiny websites on the Silverlight/ARAX stack so that before long half the web is written in it. Then, ARAX and Silverlight will get proprietary extensions (new functionality! woot!) and break on non-IE browsers (got to assure that OS monopoly). They will also add some undocumented APIs so that the (subscription-based) Microsoft Apps runs faster than anything anybody else comes ups with, and boom!
Nah. Just because they were caught by surprise doesn't mean that they won't adapt. They don't even have to do anything beyond maintain XP. I am happy that Linux has been able to provide the competitive pressure to keep Microsoft on its toes, but to suggest that MS is going to keep reinforcing failure is a pipe dream. They are already on the OLPC, you can get the EEE with XP if I remember correctly, and so on. I predict that there will soon be a windows "light" based on XP or even NT, and the cycle starts all over again.
Still, it's nice to see that after 10 years or so of stagnation, the free market in software is finally healthy again and doing its job.
This is what happens when ISPs sell customers more capacity than they can deliver. They should lose this because they promised a product they couldn't deliver and that's fraud.
I thought the most interesting part of this is that he thinks he can get a million people to do this.
Fedora is mostly a hobbyist OS (as opposed to RHEL), and I bet a lot of Fedora machines are desktops. If that number is at all realistic, the number of Linux users worldwide is way underestimated.
Right Idea, wrong website
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Netcraft doesn't track site popularity AFAIK, but Alexa does. And alexa does in fact confirm: slashdotisdying.
I mean, what the fuck guys? This is such an awesome website. I know that stupid videos get a lot of click throughs in the short term, but you're driving away your regulars with that silly shit. News, fellas, post news.
For those of you who (like me) don't know the difference between the two, from wikipedia:
DNS servers
The Domain Name System consists of a hierarchical set of DNS servers. Each domain or subdomain has one or more authoritative DNS servers that publish information about that domain and the name servers of any domains "beneath" it. The hierarchy of authoritative DNS servers matches the hierarchy of domains. At the top of the hierarchy stand the root nameservers: the servers to query when looking up (resolving) a top-level domain name (TLD).
DNS resolvers
A resolver looks up the resource record information associated with nodes. A resolver knows how to communicate with name servers by sending DNS queries and heeding DNS responses.
A DNS query may be either a recursive query or a non-recursive query:
A non-recursive query is one where the DNS server may provide a partial answer to the query (or give an error). DNS servers must support non-recursive queries.
A recursive query is one where the DNS server will fully answer the query (or give an error). DNS servers are not required to support recursive queries.
The resolver (or another DNS server acting recursively on behalf of the resolver) negotiates use of recursive service using bits in the query headers.
Resolving usually entails iterating through several name servers to find the needed information. However, some resolvers function simplistically and can communicate only with a single name server. These simple resolvers rely on a recursive query to a recursive name server to perform the work of finding information for them.
The difference is that you are going to pay somebody to do those things. Enlightenment is done as a hobby, and it still manages to come up with some pretty cool stuff that works its way into somebody's code or maybe even a finished DE someday. However, complaining that unpaid hobbyists should abandon what they enjoy doing to in favor of pursuing your priorities is like asking the guy how lives next door who builds hotrods for fun to come and fix your toyota. If you want them to finish E17 that bad, either pay them to do it or do it yourself.
Oh, and before I get that troll who says that this is the problem with open source, I would like to point out that the "hobby" development is not typical of open source software; most people who work on OSS get paid to do it (for example, by redhat, novell, mysql, sun, ibm, trolltech [now owned by nokia] etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, the book is not very complete. I perused the table of contents, but I couldn't find the section on making table based website templates anywhere. How are we supposed to make three column pages without tables?
I can see a case for throttling or traffic shaping in certain environments, especially for ISPs providing domestic lines. I really have no problem with an ISP that throttles down latency tolerant traffic like bittorrent so that everybody else on the network can use latency-sensitive applications like telephony.
Problem is, most ISPs that do this aren't straightforward about it. That is just lying.
The small business I work for provides short term student accommodation (universities here in Belgium don't have dorms like in the States, private companies or student associations organize housing). In one of our residences, 20 students in downloaded 1.2 terabytes in the month of July. The volume causes all kinds of trouble for me as the IT guy because our ISP is perpetually threatening to cut us off if we don't upgrade to $superExpensivePlanOfTheMonth. We all know here that the overwhelming majority of this traffic is p2p.
In other words, I am very sensitive to anti-piracy arguments because I have felt the pain of dealing with it. I have toyed with the idea of putting some sort of traffic shaping technology between the students and the net or limiting their access, but ultimately I have decided to put up with the headache.
This is why: Students need freedom to grow, even if they abuse it at times (or even most of the time). If I implement traffic shaping or limit bandwidth, that one CS student who uses bittorrent to distribute his project will be screwed out of an education, and the world might be screwed out of a really cool innovation. That one aspiring film maker won't be able to distribute the movie that will make her famous and change the world of art. Sooner or later all of those students will be paying for their own bandwidth and they will learn the lesson about how their abuse is hurting the rest of us, but never again in their lives will they have the opportunities to create and learn that they have now, and unfettered access to the net is part of that.
I cannot imagine any kind of traffic control that will not pose these kinds of problems. If we allow schools to shape bandwidth, the quality of the education they offer will suffer. I hope that US universities stand up for what is right on this one.
You know what this tells me?
In other words, it is search engine that has a hard time finding relevant results, is vulnerable to spam, and has a confused index.
I won't be buying stock.
You don't tell the police that they are being filmed. You just quietly film them, and when they do something inappropriate you give the tape to the local TV station and sue the department into the ground. This strategy has three advantages. First, it will be a hell of a lot harder for the DA to charge you with wiretapping when you are a local celebrity. Second, you might get something for your trouble.
Finally, and most importantly, it will force the police to behave as if they were being filmed all of the time because they just won't know who that one tinfoil hat dude is until they are being fired for beating him.
I get so sick of this debate. This is US data from the 1950's, it makes sense to present it in the manner that it was measured. We're not talking ells here. Is it really that hard to divide by 3? Is it that hard to look up a fathom?
There is nothing inherently superior about the metric system. Why does dividing by 10 matter so much, anyway? Because you have 10 fingers? Really, we should be trying to move to a system of measure that is base 2.
I disagree. I do the IT for a small business, and I love what I do. There are aspects that I don't enjoy, especially as far as managing hardware and user support are concerned, but usually it is just downright interesting. I have had the chance to learn a few programming languages and write a couple of specialized applications, which I loved. Aside from the fact that I learn something new every day, besides the fact that every new job is an interesting puzzle, the decisions I make have a real impact on the direction of the business and the well-being its employees, and the feedback from a job well done is immediate and sincere.
On the other hand, I know people who would die of frustration in my job: there is no direction from higher and you have to write your own job description on a monthly basis.
I think the IT industry is like any other: you need to find the company with a corporate culture that is right for you. If you like independence, you work for a place like mine. If you like structure, you get a job with one of the bigger code factories. Once you have found the right place, you will like what you do.
And of course such a program would be pointless anyway. If 'Designed For Windows' apps don't work under Wine then Wine itself has failed its objective.
IIRC, Wine's objective is to give software vendors a set of libraries to compile their Windows software against so that it will run under Linux, not necessarily run all windows software natively in Linux. The idea is that if it is so simple to do, people like Adobe will release a Linux version of Photoshop compiled against Wine.So actually, getting products to say that they are "compatible with Wine 1.0" is the goal. That is also the reason that they are releasing: it gives vendors a stable branch to work with.
I would really like to try out Wine, but I couldn't find the WinXP version on the site, which is strange because usually open source apps get ported over really quickly. I tried installing the source tarball in CYGWIN, but no avail. Anybody know where I can get the Win32 binaries?
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-US
You select your version with the GET variables. So, for other OS's:
- Linux: change os=win to os=linux
- Mac: change os=win to os=osx
For other languages, you can substitute the language variable such as en-GB for British English, de for German and fr for French. Not all of them are up right now, but they will be soon.I believe he meant:
'/\/\./'
I might just be getting old, but I think that music today is less compelling than it was 10 or even 5 years ago. Seriously, music today is crap. The drop probably has more to do with people not wanting big label music even if they can get it for free over the internet.
Of course, it should be noted that one percent is much smaller than the sampling error for this kind of thing, so for all we know it could have gone up.
- charge for support
- charge for customization
- get free QC
- use all the other free tools out there for your own development
In other words, sell software as a service, not as a product.All I want for Christmas is rich text (links, images) in my gmail signature... third party extensions do this but they are are a PITA
"Wtf are you talking about? How much does a budget PC with Linux and sendmail/postfix cost for christ sake?"
That doesn't do shared calendaring, like an exchange server or Google Apps. Besides, its not the cost of hardware, its the staff that counts. If you have your own server, you need to have people on hand who can administer it. I have a one year contract, and when I am done the company should be able to operate with little or no input from people like me.
"Incidentaly , how will your business function on those occasions you lose your net access"
That happened not too long ago. Our service provider got into a fight with its backbone provider and we lost the net for a week. Being on line saved our butts. If we had implemented your solution, we would have lost one of the year's best weeks in sales because both the email server and the website's interface with our customer DB would have been down. We simply forwarded the phones to our private cells and worked from home. We used google chat to cross talk. It was one of the most productive weeks we have ever had... so much so that if it was not necessary to actually meet clients in an office, and give a little supervisory oversight to the interns, we might scrap it all together.
Otherwise, we make nightly backups of our online DB should our hosting service ever go under like our service provider did.
AFAIK, a Finnish classical music composer.
- Trident (ie7): 13
- Trident (ie6): 6
- Gecko: 75
Opera and Safari are of course, disqualified as they hacked together 100 scores.I tinker with JS a bit, and things like attaching event listeners, getting first children, getting attributes, getting values, getting the URL, basically everything DOM related has to be treated differently in IE.
Worse, XMLHttpRequest, the very core of AJAX, is broken in IE7, but not IE6.
I am sorry, but you are wrong on that count. I guess if you call horrible to slightly less horrible an improvement, this is a good thing. Visual Studio 2008 works extremely well for creating AJAX enabled content that works cross-browser, without rolling all your own client code. Oh, it becomes clear. Microsoft wants to make it impossible to implement your own JS solution so that you have to buy into their development tools to build a site that works. What a surprise. Third, Silverlight is not an IE/Windows only platform. It is, however, a Windows only platform. Moonlight is still vaporware, last I heard. And if you really think they're going to try that bait and switch tactic again, you're nuts. MS is not that stupid. They actually want Silverlight to be valid and compete with Flash. What makes you say that? But why am I arguing? I should be asking for examples of where MS is doing as you suggest they will. I cannot give examples of events that have yet to transpire. The company's history is well known.
- easier administration for both systems as a whole and the client machines
- world wide access
- real-time collaboration
Our business runs entirely on web-based applications except for MS word, and like I said, google docs is getting there. The net is only getting faster and I can't image a single advantage of client-side software for business administration. Applications like photoshop and autocad will probably remain local for years to come, but that is a pretty small niche in the overall scheme of things.*: somebody always counters this with "but you don't control the server!!!1!" Look, no small business has its own mail server. Google's is just as secure as Joe Blows ISP.
Microsoft knows that web applications will soon threaten their client-side sales model. They also know that places like Google have enough of a head start in the AJAX world that they will never catch up (tried google apps lately? It is really getting there, especially if you do a lot of collaborative work). This is why IE's javascript standards compliancy still sucks balls even though its CSS support isn't bad: they want to make life hard for people trying to develop in AJAX.
Now they are trying to develop proprietary technologies to compete: Silverlight and this new ARAX bull will replace Flash and AJAX. They will release some shit-hot developer tools that make it really easy to build shiny websites on the Silverlight/ARAX stack so that before long half the web is written in it. Then, ARAX and Silverlight will get proprietary extensions (new functionality! woot!) and break on non-IE browsers (got to assure that OS monopoly). They will also add some undocumented APIs so that the (subscription-based) Microsoft Apps runs faster than anything anybody else comes ups with, and boom!
Profit.
Nah. Just because they were caught by surprise doesn't mean that they won't adapt. They don't even have to do anything beyond maintain XP. I am happy that Linux has been able to provide the competitive pressure to keep Microsoft on its toes, but to suggest that MS is going to keep reinforcing failure is a pipe dream. They are already on the OLPC, you can get the EEE with XP if I remember correctly, and so on. I predict that there will soon be a windows "light" based on XP or even NT, and the cycle starts all over again.
Still, it's nice to see that after 10 years or so of stagnation, the free market in software is finally healthy again and doing its job.
This is what happens when ISPs sell customers more capacity than they can deliver. They should lose this because they promised a product they couldn't deliver and that's fraud.
I thought the most interesting part of this is that he thinks he can get a million people to do this.
Fedora is mostly a hobbyist OS (as opposed to RHEL), and I bet a lot of Fedora machines are desktops. If that number is at all realistic, the number of Linux users worldwide is way underestimated.
Netcraft doesn't track site popularity AFAIK, but Alexa does. And alexa does in fact confirm: slashdot is dying.
I mean, what the fuck guys? This is such an awesome website. I know that stupid videos get a lot of click throughs in the short term, but you're driving away your regulars with that silly shit. News, fellas, post news.
The difference is that you are going to pay somebody to do those things. Enlightenment is done as a hobby, and it still manages to come up with some pretty cool stuff that works its way into somebody's code or maybe even a finished DE someday. However, complaining that unpaid hobbyists should abandon what they enjoy doing to in favor of pursuing your priorities is like asking the guy how lives next door who builds hotrods for fun to come and fix your toyota. If you want them to finish E17 that bad, either pay them to do it or do it yourself.
Oh, and before I get that troll who says that this is the problem with open source, I would like to point out that the "hobby" development is not typical of open source software; most people who work on OSS get paid to do it (for example, by redhat, novell, mysql, sun, ibm, trolltech [now owned by nokia] etc.)