It seem to me that having URLs with extensions of:
.asp,.php,.phtml,.shtml,.pl,, etc.
is incorrect. What is being served is not an ASP script, nor is it a PHP script, nor it is a Perl program. It is, however, an HTML file (or a GIF, or a PDF, etc.), and should be labelled as such.
If your server isn't smart enough to figure out how to generate the requested resource, and needs the generating program explicitly mentioned in the URL, then you need a smarter server. And if you aren't smart enough to figure out how to do this correctly, well...=)
Remember, kids, a URL != a file. All the/. end user cares about is getting an article with the comments formatted appropriately. They don't care[1] if it's stored as a text file, or generated by Perl, or..
[1] Well, they might care in a geek sense, but not in the way needed to read comments.
What they're talking about is a watermark embedded using steganography -- placed into the noise of the image, much like copy protection of digital images can be done by Photoshop (and other programs) now.
Jakob Nielsen's article on Metcalfe's Law offers good insight on why the segregation of different AIM clients is a bad thing, and reduces the potential value of the network.
Metcalfe's Law states that "the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network".
Reversing this law provides:
The value of partitioning a network into N isolated components is 1/N'th the value of the original network.
This new law follows directly from the original Metcalfe's Law. Each of the new components has a size of 1/N'th the size of the original network. Thus, its value is 1/(N[squared]) of the original value. At the same time, there are N of these new mini-networks, so the over-all value is N * 1/(N[squared]) = 1/N
Note to Rob: We need SUB and SUP tags allowed in/.
The Playboy case would be more analagous to a journalist putting up a web site and advertising themselves as "a New York Times journalist", which, if it were true, would be valid (well, I don't think the court has ruled in the Playboy case, aside denying Playboy's attempt at a preliminary injunction)
Terri Welles/was/ a Playboy Playmate, and as such, is allowed to call herself that wherever she chooses.
Well, the docs say that the result of MOD has the sign of the divisor. This makes sense. However, the result of -3 mod 7 is returned as -3. I ran into this when trying to do day-of-the-week calcuations.
I know about the custom tags -- they don't help when you want to do evalution in the place where you can use built in functions. For example, you can write:
<CFSET foo = StructFind( bar, baz )>
But not:
<FSET foo = MyFunction( bar )>
Furthermore, custom tags can't return values, unless you play silly games with variable names and scopes that really smells like a hack to me. The reusability they provide is at best adequate, I've found.
I'll agree that CF has it's place -- it works as a good "plug-dynamic-values-in-here" engine. But I really can't recommend it for functions that involve more than a very small amount of complexity.
Anyway...I could rant for a while about ColdFusion, and so could some of my co-workers. We've done some pretty hairy projects with it, and in the end, have determined that it really wasn't worth it. I'll stand by the statement that anything that can be done in ColdFusion can be done as easily, as stably, and as quickly by PHP. Not to mention, less expensively, and free-as-in-speech-ly. Which is why I say PHP is a better ColdFusion than ColdFusion.
The original post (and all those succeeding) are offtopic. It'd be nice to have a "meta" flag that could be turned on for posts to talk about the post itself, rather than the contents. That way, things could be filtered out by that. Also, a forum for the discussion of the mechanics of/. might be nice. So people can be on-topic when flaming Hemos for his English skills. =)
Online headlines are often displayed out of context: as part of a list of articles, in an email program's list of incoming messages, in a search engine hitlist, or in a browser's bookmark menu or other navigation aid. Some of these situations are very out of context: search engine hits can relate to any random topic, so users don't get the benefit of applying background understanding to the interpretation of the headline.
Even when a headline is displayed together with related content, the difficulty of reading online and the reduced amount of information that can be seen in a glance make it harder for users to learn enough from the surrounding data. In print, a headline is tightly associated with photos, decks, subheads, and the full body of the article, all of which can be interpreted in a single glance. Online, a much smaller amount of information will be visible in the window, and even that information is harder and more unpleasant to read, so people often don't do so. While scanning the list of stories on a site like news.com, users often only look at the highlighted headlines and skip most of the summaries.
Consider, for example, the impact of violating the guidelines for microcontent authoring in writing the headline for a news item on an intranet home page. For a company with 10,000 employees, the cost of a single poorly written headline on an intranet home page is almost $5,000. Considerably more than the cost of having a good home page editor rewrite the headline before it goes up.
If Hemos spends 5 extra minutes writing a clear, concise headline, and that saves 10,000 slashdot readers 5 seconds of scanning and thinking each, then that's a gain of 49,700 seconds for the/. community.
Re:it will not cover 2.0.6 (especially smbmount)
on
Using Samba
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· Score: 1
That's too bad. But, I imagine the non-dead-trees version will be updated at some point in the near future (after it gets online, anyway) to include this information.
Questions and comments
on
Using Samba
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· Score: 2
Does the book cover 2.0.6? This is somewhat important, because smbmount has been changed to work with mount, and I'm still figuring out the best way to utilize this.
Secondly, I've heard that this book will be available online, in addition to dead tree format, for those who are cheap, or want to explore new economic models for content.
I would guess that "ergonometric" would be valid as describing "the quantitative measurement of ergonomics". But in the context of Mr. Gore's usage, yes, "ergonomic" would be the correct word.
All this poor word choice has left me disorientated.
For a quick example: Can you do 'skins' with your web application in PHP? In other words, completely swap out the look-and-feel for another without touching any Perl/PHP/ASP/Python code? Iaijutsu can, because it uses a template system where the Perl code supplies a set of data to an HTML-like template language. Separation of logic from presentation.
Sounds sorta like XSLT, but the other way around Have you considered the XSLT approach?
FWIW, XSLT was upgraded from working draft to recommendation very recently
Now, the page itself is pretty much 4.0 compliant, albeit somewhat complex; the W3 validator bitches about ampersands in CGI URIs, so there's nothing I can do about that. In any case...
There is something you can do. If you want to link to a URL like:
http://host/script.cgi?foo=bar&baz=quux
...then the URL should be written in the source as:
To be a dull, pragmatic reply to what was meant to be a humorous post, I'm sure this is because minors (in the US...hmmm...) can't agree to contracts such as license agreements.
Each mozilla release is more painful than the last. What I mean is that each one gets that much closer to being usable for my everyday browsing and e-mail/news needs. So close, I can almost taste it.
Erm...even PHP 3 was a better ColdFusion than ColdFusion is. My experiences with ColdFusion have been less than stellar -- incorrect implementationsof simple operators like MOD, no ability to write functions(!?), reusable design only with great pains. (Of course, PHP is no panacea for good design, but CF is far worse.) And as far as I can tell, Allaire has little interest in making ColdFusion a solid, stable product -- only in marketing it as such.
First off, it's Netcraft that does the web server stats, not Mindcraft.
However, unless very significant improvements occurr in Linux performance, and soon, the Linux-Apache combo may be replaced in popularity by an Apache-(fill-in-the-blank-with-your-favorite-*nix) combo. Does anyone else see this as a possibility?
Is this bad? Granted, it'd be nice to see Apache-on-an-Open-Source-OS as the dominant "platform", but that's already the case, isn't it? Linux is not the be-all and end-all of server OSes. I couldn't find any OS stats on Netcraft, so I couldn't tell how Apache is broken up among Linux, *BSD, NT, AIX, Solaris, etc.
Also, as you said, Apache is largely platform independant, as long as your platform smells like *nix. (Although I don't know about how Apache runs on BeOS.) The Apache group admits that Win32 is a second-class platform for Apache. How important this is is debatable.
You don't need HTML for clickable links. The standard (spelled out in an RFC, I believe -- I don't know the number offhand) method of denoting a URI* in text/plain is of the form:
<uri:http://slashdot.org/>
Then, al you need is an application that correctly implements this scheme, and you're well on your way to happy land.
IE 4.5 for Mac OS (the latest version) is already a better browser than IE 5 is. It may lack the broken XML/XSL support that IE 5 "features", but as far as usability and configurability, 4.5 beats 5 for Windows hands down.
If the original publisher opts not to publish a book in braille format, isn't another publisher free (as in speech) to publish a braille version of that book? I seem to recall something like that...
Slashdot Mirror
It seem to me that having URLs with extensions of:
is incorrect. What is being served is not an ASP script, nor is it a PHP script, nor it is a Perl program. It is, however, an HTML file (or a GIF, or a PDF, etc.), and should be labelled as such.
If your server isn't smart enough to figure out how to generate the requested resource, and needs the generating program explicitly mentioned in the URL, then you need a smarter server. And if you aren't smart enough to figure out how to do this correctly, well...=)
Remember, kids, a URL != a file. All the /. end user cares about is getting an article with the comments formatted appropriately. They don't care[1] if it's stored as a text file, or generated by Perl, or..
[1] Well, they might care in a geek sense, but not in the way needed to read comments.
What they're talking about is a watermark embedded using steganography -- placed into the noise of the image, much like copy protection of digital images can be done by Photoshop (and other programs) now.
I'm correcting you. November has a whole slew of them. The 3rd, 5th, 7th, 11th, 13th, 17th, 19th, 23rd, 29th.
Jakob Nielsen's article on Metcalfe's Law offers good insight on why the segregation of different AIM clients is a bad thing, and reduces the potential value of the network.
Metcalfe's Law states that "the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network".
Reversing this law provides:
Note to Rob: We need SUB and SUP tags allowed in /.
The Playboy case would be more analagous to a journalist putting up a web site and advertising themselves as "a New York Times journalist", which, if it were true, would be valid (well, I don't think the court has ruled in the Playboy case, aside denying Playboy's attempt at a preliminary injunction)
Terri Welles /was/ a Playboy Playmate, and as such, is allowed to call herself that wherever she chooses.
Well, the docs say that the result of MOD has the sign of the divisor. This makes sense. However, the result of -3 mod 7 is returned as -3. I ran into this when trying to do day-of-the-week calcuations.
I know about the custom tags -- they don't help when you want to do evalution in the place where you can use built in functions. For example, you can write:
<CFSET foo = StructFind( bar, baz )>
But not:
<FSET foo = MyFunction( bar )>
Furthermore, custom tags can't return values, unless you play silly games with variable names and scopes that really smells like a hack to me. The reusability they provide is at best adequate, I've found.
I'll agree that CF has it's place -- it works as a good "plug-dynamic-values-in-here" engine. But I really can't recommend it for functions that involve more than a very small amount of complexity.
Anyway...I could rant for a while about ColdFusion, and so could some of my co-workers. We've done some pretty hairy projects with it, and in the end, have determined that it really wasn't worth it. I'll stand by the statement that anything that can be done in ColdFusion can be done as easily, as stably, and as quickly by PHP. Not to mention, less expensively, and free-as-in-speech-ly. Which is why I say PHP is a better ColdFusion than ColdFusion.
The original post (and all those succeeding) are offtopic. It'd be nice to have a "meta" flag that could be turned on for posts to talk about the post itself, rather than the contents. That way, things could be filtered out by that. Also, a forum for the discussion of the mechanics of /. might be nice. So people can be on-topic when flaming Hemos for his English skills. =)
I'd suggest a read of Jakob Nielsen's column on writing microcontent. Some useful snippets:
Also, the impact of good headlines can be seen in this article on the cost of poor information on intranets, but is relevant to anything that has a large number of readers -- though the economics aren't as direct.
If Hemos spends 5 extra minutes writing a clear, concise headline, and that saves 10,000 slashdot readers 5 seconds of scanning and thinking each, then that's a gain of 49,700 seconds for the /. community.
That's too bad. But, I imagine the non-dead-trees version will be updated at some point in the near future (after it gets online, anyway) to include this information.
Does the book cover 2.0.6? This is somewhat important, because smbmount has been changed to work with mount, and I'm still figuring out the best way to utilize this.
Secondly, I've heard that this book will be available online, in addition to dead tree format, for those who are cheap, or want to explore new economic models for content.
I would guess that "ergonometric" would be valid as describing "the quantitative measurement of ergonomics". But in the context of Mr. Gore's usage, yes, "ergonomic" would be the correct word.
All this poor word choice has left me disorientated.
Sounds sorta like XSLT, but the other way around Have you considered the XSLT approach?
FWIW, XSLT was upgraded from working draft to recommendation very recently
There is something you can do. If you want to link to a URL like:
http://host/script.cgi?foo=bar&baz=quux
http://host/script.cgi?foo=bar&baz=quux
To be a dull, pragmatic reply to what was meant to be a humorous post, I'm sure this is because minors (in the US...hmmm...) can't agree to contracts such as license agreements.
Each mozilla release is more painful than the last. What I mean is that each one gets that much closer to being usable for my everyday browsing and e-mail/news needs. So close, I can almost taste it.
Erm...even PHP 3 was a better ColdFusion than ColdFusion is. My experiences with ColdFusion have been less than stellar -- incorrect implementationsof simple operators like MOD, no ability to write functions(!?), reusable design only with great pains. (Of course, PHP is no panacea for good design, but CF is far worse.) And as far as I can tell, Allaire has little interest in making ColdFusion a solid, stable product -- only in marketing it as such.
Oops...didn't realize you were talking about performance -- that is indeed Mindcraft. Don't mind me.
First off, it's Netcraft that does the web server stats, not Mindcraft.
Is this bad? Granted, it'd be nice to see Apache-on-an-Open-Source-OS as the dominant "platform", but that's already the case, isn't it? Linux is not the be-all and end-all of server OSes. I couldn't find any OS stats on Netcraft, so I couldn't tell how Apache is broken up among Linux, *BSD, NT, AIX, Solaris, etc.
Also, as you said, Apache is largely platform independant, as long as your platform smells like *nix. (Although I don't know about how Apache runs on BeOS.) The Apache group admits that Win32 is a second-class platform for Apache. How important this is is debatable.
That already happened too. According to cartoon laws of physics, you'd be better off not checking whether you're alive.
IceTe is one of them
You don't need HTML for clickable links. The standard (spelled out in an RFC, I believe -- I don't know the number offhand) method of denoting a URI* in text/plain is of the form:
<uri:http://slashdot.org/>
Then, al you need is an application that correctly implements this scheme, and you're well on your way to happy land.
*All URLs are URIs.
IE 4.5 for Mac OS (the latest version) is already a better browser than IE 5 is. It may lack the broken XML/XSL support that IE 5 "features", but as far as usability and configurability, 4.5 beats 5 for Windows hands down.
Slashdot would only get half as many posts if you eliminated the mindless knee-jerking.
All of it, except reader-submitted reviews, feature articles, and Ask Slashdot.
Unless of course, you meant for very small values of all...
If the original publisher opts not to publish a book in braille format, isn't another publisher free (as in speech) to publish a braille version of that book? I seem to recall something like that...