I should have mentioned that I used NT3.51 as my daily driver. It was very robust, and the underlying OS was nice, but it was significantly less "snappy" than Windows 95, OS/2, or NT 4 on the same hardware.
Truth is that few people here used Windows 3.51, almost nobody used it for graphically intensive stuff, and the whole idea it was super stable because of the video architecture is almost entirely an unsubstantiated old wives tale.
(3.51 was super slow... anyone could tell you that. It also had very minimal 3rd party driver support, and basically zero games. Oh, and there was no way to restart the user-space GDE either.)
I suffered through a buttload of NT4 crashes, and very few of them were ever video-related. (NTFS.SYS, I'm looking at you.)
No, the terrible thing is your reading comprehension skills. The point is simple -- send a 302 after the POST and the browser history mechanism doesn't break.
> nobody else knew how to use it or cared to learn.
Aside from accessiblity (maybe a screen reader picks it up and communicates it?) -- I've seen AccessKeys used successfully in several webapps that replaced old style terminal applications, where there's a trained userbase doing data entry type stuff.
They could state this as policy in the employee handbook. At least you know what you are in for then. Also, I have to say that I find it a little childish and stupid on the companies part.
If they knew they what they were in for, the little trick wouldn't work, would it?
And yes, it's stupid. That's because most people are stupid, that's how the world works, designed for the stupid. As I said in another post, you can take the most professional guy, give him a better job with higher pay, and he'll still make the "stupid" decision of poking around his old systems if given a chance.
At least this way, he got say his goodbyes and collect his legal box full of personal crap. If he feels jerked now for being treated fairly, it would have been worse if they called him at home and told him never to come back.
That's not quite what being asynchronous means. Asynchronous means not sitting idly by waiting for a (remote procedure/http) call to finish.
And that's exactly why frames aren't asynchronous -- a frame can only load one URL at a time, so the "hidden frame" sites tend to break if you start pushing buttons too fast. A correctly written XMLHTTP site doesn't have this problem.
(Except for that evil hack I've seen where iframes are dynamically added to a page.)
I had an old boss that taught me this trick about 10 years ago -- When a sysadmin quits, give him a two week paid vacation and immediately change all the passwords. Most of them had something lined up anyways, and if they weren't backdooring things, they were just going to sit around shorttiming it.
Funny thing was nearly every system admin that resigned attempted to access the systems during their enforced vacation. Probably nothing malicious, but since you don't know that, it's a wise policy.
Right, you can't, so that's why you don't. Redirect the user's browser to make a GET request that shows the results of a successful submit. Solved problem in 1996.
When Flashblock sees a certain tag, it puts a button on a web page. When you click the button, something plugin-related happens. If your read the patent, it sems pretty cut-n-dried.
I knew someone would bite on that. ActiveX/COM actually was standardized by The Open Group (the UNIX people).
Besides, it's documented, there's multiple implementations, there's no patents that people are aware of -- just because Your Favorite Platform doesn't use it doesn't make it any less of an open standard.
> All Microsoft would have to do would be to GPL Explorer.
All they would have to do is GPL the relatively trival module responsible for sending messages between explorer and the plugins. Which would effectively give MS an out, so it probably won't happen.
I agree this was a very dumbly written patent if it can be evaded by a single mouse click or trival code change.
I don't know where you got the silly idea that distributed development can make mozilla.org or Apple magically immune from patent litigation. They are still distributing the software.
No, wait, I do know where you got the idea -- it's the "Not Me!" defense plagiarized from Family Circle.
> Does Eolas really want to unleash Google on them?
You're aware they just successfully beat Microsoft, right?
Clearly there are some Firefox extentions that affect how you interact with a web page -- FlashBlock being the example I responded to already.
But what you say is equally true of ActiveX controls -- 99% installed on a Windows system have nothing to do with webpage rendering or interaction. So obviously, the discussion was being limited to those plugins or components which do affect such.
Offering any GPL product the royalty free use of the patent. Offering the royalty free use of the patent to any browser that is available for non-windows platforms and updated regularly
The GPL premble states this:
We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
Where, presumably, "everyone" includes Microsoft. Granting some GPL-specific, Firefox-specific, or non-Windows-specific patent grant surely violates this intent.
Because of the GPL, Firefox will need to work-around the patent, even if Eolas is not specifically going after them.
I knew someone would turn this into a flamefest about ActiveX.
Allow me to make a technical point on slashdot -- ActiveX is nothing more than an interface standard. It's neither "secure" or "insecure" by itself. As it is used in IE it's no less secure than any other browser plugin mechanism, including those found in Firefox or Safari.
The technology you dislike is not ActiveX -- it's called Internet Component Download. And while it still exists, it's pretty limited in XPSP2, and there's been some rumblings that it will be removed alltogether in Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
I should have mentioned that I used NT3.51 as my daily driver. It was very robust, and the underlying OS was nice, but it was significantly less "snappy" than Windows 95, OS/2, or NT 4 on the same hardware.
Microsoft had a contract with SCO that they specifically would NOT enter the UNIX market, in return for SCO supporting Xenix.
This is some bullshit that's been tossed around forever, without any substantiation.
Not so much funny, but insightful ....
... anyone could tell you that. It also had very minimal 3rd party driver support, and basically zero games. Oh, and there was no way to restart the user-space GDE either.)
Truth is that few people here used Windows 3.51, almost nobody used it for graphically intensive stuff, and the whole idea it was super stable because of the video architecture is almost entirely an unsubstantiated old wives tale.
(3.51 was super slow
I suffered through a buttload of NT4 crashes, and very few of them were ever video-related. (NTFS.SYS, I'm looking at you.)
Have to disagree -- My mother is a neophyte computer user, and by watching her, I learned a few interesting things:
+ The "Task Oriented" interface in Windows XP is a huge ease-of-use feature
+ The XP Help system is actually helpful to some people.
Whereas, myself and most other "power users" tend to immediately revert our desktops to Windows 95/NT style, which disables a lot of this stuff.
(Although I will agree about file extentions. As long as they are still important to endusers, they should be shown.)
No, the terrible thing is your reading comprehension skills. The point is simple -- send a 302 after the POST and the browser history mechanism doesn't break.
> nobody else knew how to use it or cared to learn.
Aside from accessiblity (maybe a screen reader picks it up and communicates it?) -- I've seen AccessKeys used successfully in several webapps that replaced old style terminal applications, where there's a trained userbase doing data entry type stuff.
They could state this as policy in the employee handbook. At least you know what you are in for then. Also, I have to say that I find it a little childish and stupid on the companies part.
If they knew they what they were in for, the little trick wouldn't work, would it?
And yes, it's stupid. That's because most people are stupid, that's how the world works, designed for the stupid. As I said in another post, you can take the most professional guy, give him a better job with higher pay, and he'll still make the "stupid" decision of poking around his old systems if given a chance.
At least this way, he got say his goodbyes and collect his legal box full of personal crap. If he feels jerked now for being treated fairly, it would have been worse if they called him at home and told him never to come back.
That's not quite what being asynchronous means. Asynchronous means not sitting idly by waiting for a (remote procedure/http) call to finish.
And that's exactly why frames aren't asynchronous -- a frame can only load one URL at a time, so the "hidden frame" sites tend to break if you start pushing buttons too fast. A correctly written XMLHTTP site doesn't have this problem.
(Except for that evil hack I've seen where iframes are dynamically added to a page.)
I had an old boss that taught me this trick about 10 years ago -- When a sysadmin quits, give him a two week paid vacation and immediately change all the passwords. Most of them had something lined up anyways, and if they weren't backdooring things, they were just going to sit around shorttiming it.
Funny thing was nearly every system admin that resigned attempted to access the systems during their enforced vacation. Probably nothing malicious, but since you don't know that, it's a wise policy.
> Can you bookmark results on POST submits? No
Right, you can't, so that's why you don't. Redirect the user's browser to make a GET request that shows the results of a successful submit. Solved problem in 1996.
> Simple: Aperture isn't a RAW workflow tool.
Well http://www.apple.com/aperture/ says it is. But what do they know.
Well, the marketing shifted around so much, COM==ActiveX as far as most people are concerned.
The COM/DCOM Reference: Documentation for ActiveX Core Technology
Sorry, NEC: http://www.biosmagazine.co.uk/article.php?id=2504
When Flashblock sees a certain tag, it puts a button on a web page. When you click the button, something plugin-related happens. If your read the patent, it sems pretty cut-n-dried.
You act like "FOSS" has some sort of central brain or something. The truth is:
(A) Replicating DCOM is actually quite difficult, even if you have all the specs, as the WINE people have learned.
(B) NIH factors have created 9 incompatible copies of COM (XPCOM, KParts, Bonobo, etc) because nobody had any foresight in the matter.
(C) Outside of web browsers, Open Source developers actually don't give a fuck about full standards support.
> I discussed the practicality of a Powerbook Nano. A totally solid state machine designed for instant on and robust handling
Just as a sidenote, Toshiba just announced such a laptop. There were also some flash-based laptops back in the 386 era.
Well, IE doesn't even fully support HTML 2.0, because Netscape patented the HEAD tag.
"As an additional freedom, a special exception is granted for linking to [foo]..." Done all the time in the GPL world. There's also the LGPL.
I knew someone would bite on that. ActiveX/COM actually was standardized by The Open Group (the UNIX people).
Besides, it's documented, there's multiple implementations, there's no patents that people are aware of -- just because Your Favorite Platform doesn't use it doesn't make it any less of an open standard.
> All Microsoft would have to do would be to GPL Explorer.
All they would have to do is GPL the relatively trival module responsible for sending messages between explorer and the plugins. Which would effectively give MS an out, so it probably won't happen.
I agree this was a very dumbly written patent if it can be evaded by a single mouse click or trival code change.
I don't know where you got the silly idea that distributed development can make mozilla.org or Apple magically immune from patent litigation. They are still distributing the software.
No, wait, I do know where you got the idea -- it's the "Not Me!" defense plagiarized from Family Circle.
> Does Eolas really want to unleash Google on them?
You're aware they just successfully beat Microsoft, right?
Clearly there are some Firefox extentions that affect how you interact with a web page -- FlashBlock being the example I responded to already.
But what you say is equally true of ActiveX controls -- 99% installed on a Windows system have nothing to do with webpage rendering or interaction. So obviously, the discussion was being limited to those plugins or components which do affect such.
The GPL premble states this:
Where, presumably, "everyone" includes Microsoft. Granting some GPL-specific, Firefox-specific, or non-Windows-specific patent grant surely violates this intent.
Because of the GPL, Firefox will need to work-around the patent, even if Eolas is not specifically going after them.
I knew someone would turn this into a flamefest about ActiveX.
Allow me to make a technical point on slashdot -- ActiveX is nothing more than an interface standard. It's neither "secure" or "insecure" by itself. As it is used in IE it's no less secure than any other browser plugin mechanism, including those found in Firefox or Safari.
The technology you dislike is not ActiveX -- it's called Internet Component Download. And while it still exists, it's pretty limited in XPSP2, and there's been some rumblings that it will be removed alltogether in Vista.