A while back, as my company was/is migrating from Netscape 4 (which supports telnet:// and rlogin://) to Netscape 6/7/Moz 1.X, I investigated what was up with the fact that Mozilla and all its derivatives no longer support telnet:// or rlogin:// on Unix machines. What I found was pretty disturbing. There is a section of the code, that is OS specific, that is supposed to handle "extensions" to the URI tags. Windows implements this by digging into the OS registry, pulling out the right executable, and calling it. This is evidenced by the fact that you can use the newer browers on a Windows box, click on a telnet:// link and voila! you have a hyperterm or telnet connecting you where you wanted to go.
The same source code in the Unix version appears to have been cut/pasted from the Windows version and then had everything but the first handful of comments (which still refer to the Windows Registry!) excised. Leaving no way directly in the code to extend your URI tags.
I have *recently* seen that someone hacked up an XPI to re-implement telnet:// and a few other choice things, but his code only works on Moz 1.3 and relatively new Firebird installations, so it doesn't suit my needs. I tried poking at it to make it default some values, to see if that was all that was wrong with the earlier stuff (i.e. no way to set up the "helper apps" from NS 6/7 etc) but that didn't work.
So how do we expect the Mozilla family of browsers to handle even more new tags? Is there going to be some standard way to extend this, without resorting to XPI hacks that are heavily version dependant? Will someone actually implement the OS-specific code necessary? (no, don't ask me to do it, I'm a support guy, not a coder, and anything I'd write would be horrible I'm sure). I can't see how this is likely to fly very far....
It obviously doesn't, but it has to go through the process now to prove it. I still don't see how that gives the FCC any more power to enforce than the FTC, unless someone thinks the FCC pulls more "clout" somehow.
The fact is, it's going to take you a LOT longer to read the corrupt passages.
Maybe you need to quantify "a LOT" "a lot better", because it didn't take me anything like seconds vs. milliseconds to read the stuff with the letters scrambled.
That's what you get expecting "experts" to answer any questions for you.
Personal observation and various readings in the topic make me pretty confident that context is critical for letter recognition. Whether that means words are recognized as "whole words" or not, the fact is, it very clearly is not a simple, straightforward bottom up "letters then phonemes then syllables then words" recognition process. Recognizing the letters is partly a feedback loop with the words and other parts, as demonstrated by experiments where parts of letters are blacked out. In a recognizable context (i.e. a word) they're still identifiable. Standing alone, they are not.
I can always ask to be placed on a do not call list. Yes, they do work.
Horse. Shit.
I can name two instances without even having to think hard where an organization specifically ignored my request. Was it the fault of a stupid employee? So fucking what. I asked, it didn't happen, they called again, I ripped the poor SOB on the other end a new asshole.
I have caller ID. I even have "privacy manager" from SBC. Of course that doesn't help if they call from an identified, but otherwise anonymous number like, say "Illinois call". Or their cellphone. Conveenient how it is that calling card calls from my mother in law also come through as "Illinois call" etc.
I said it before and I'll say it again. If they don't want to implement voluntary opt-in for their harassment, I'm 100% behind government forcing them to accept opt-out on a national scale. I'm not their employer, and I don't owe any of them a job.
I only had to put up ONE "no soliciting" sign on the front door. It's ludicrous to defend a requirement that I effectively have to put one up for every moron individually who might come knocking to sell me something.
Why does this decision/law put us on a slippery slope to "no advertising"?? I don't recall advertising in general to be under any kind of attack. In fact it is the expansion of advertising into the realm of my goddamn dinner hour that makes this an issue at all.
I personally fail to see how it is some great inconvenience to have telemarketers calling you every so often.
I guess they don't call you at 9:30pm and wake your 1 year old baby. I guess they don't call you and interrupt dinner, which is supposed to be time to spend together as a family (at least in my house). I guess you must not have a life or have magically managed to not get your name on a list to do something like buy a house, have a child, etc. which seems to open the floodgates to those who think you must want to buy something that only they can tell you about and only over the phone.
Oh wait, I guess I could just turn off my phones whenever I don't care right? Too bad I have extended family that sometimes needs to get hold of me at unexpected time.
Things that appear cut and dried to you and me usually have plenty of wiggle room for the enterprising lawyer. My point is that it would have to be crafted very carefully, not just slapped together out of what slashdot readers think makes sense.
You know what? I don't owe telemarketing drones a job. I don't owe McDonald's drones a job. I don't owe anyone a job. If I don't go to McDonald's, and spend my money on real food, am I denying high school kids jobs? Maybe so, maybe not, but it's not any fucking different except that I can't today reliably refuse all calls from telemarketers.
You'd think the morons would recognize the fact that if someone wants to sign up for this list, that means THEY WON'T MAKE A SALE BY CALLING THEM. But no...they have to play the victim like every other half-baked fool in this country.
There has to be a better way. Amending the constitution over such a relatively trivial matter (yes, I'm on the do not call list too, but I can't see how this is a matter of constitutional level import) would be insane.
Isn't this a bed that ICANN created for themselves? While I agree that Verisign is once again proving themselves to be Complete Bastards [tm], seems to me that there's a fair amount of "I Told You So" due to ICANN as well.
Re:Eco Book
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I actually hated "The Island..." but most of the rest of Eco's fiction is really good, so comparisons to Eco are reasonable. If you liked Cryptonomicon, I'd recommend you go check out _The Name of the Rose_ and _Foucault's Pendulum_ in particular. Very dense, but excellent writing.
C'mon guys, couldn't you have waited until TOMORROW when the book is actually released? Now I'm gonna have a major case of blueballs waiting to go to the store tomorrow.
Right. And then later they import the same bad data from another reporting service that you managed to miss last time. I don't think I have enough time in my life to work for a living, have a family and a house AND chase down every possible avenue of bad information into the credit system and correct them all simultaneously so they don't pollute each other.
By mandating total transparency of data, the community can actually act to verify and "clean" it.
Just like we can "clean" our credit records of errors, right? In case you missed it, that statement is dripping with sarcasm. If you've ever tried to fix your credit history you know it's damn near impossible.
No no no no. The industry is struggling to figure out how to make money, so the idea is to make a new form factor that requires, in order to upgrade, the purchase of
a new motherboard
probably a new CPU
a new case, and
a new graphics card
all in one shot. No more of this reusing everything but the component you want to upgrade stuff!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, URL's were never expected to be as exposed to the world as they are today either.
Because it's topical to the article in question?
The same source code in the Unix version appears to have been cut/pasted from the Windows version and then had everything but the first handful of comments (which still refer to the Windows Registry!) excised. Leaving no way directly in the code to extend your URI tags.
I have *recently* seen that someone hacked up an XPI to re-implement telnet:// and a few other choice things, but his code only works on Moz 1.3 and relatively new Firebird installations, so it doesn't suit my needs. I tried poking at it to make it default some values, to see if that was all that was wrong with the earlier stuff (i.e. no way to set up the "helper apps" from NS 6/7 etc) but that didn't work.
So how do we expect the Mozilla family of browsers to handle even more new tags? Is there going to be some standard way to extend this, without resorting to XPI hacks that are heavily version dependant? Will someone actually implement the OS-specific code necessary? (no, don't ask me to do it, I'm a support guy, not a coder, and anything I'd write would be horrible I'm sure). I can't see how this is likely to fly very far....
It obviously doesn't, but it has to go through the process now to prove it. I still don't see how that gives the FCC any more power to enforce than the FTC, unless someone thinks the FCC pulls more "clout" somehow.
Maybe you need to quantify "a LOT" "a lot better", because it didn't take me anything like seconds vs. milliseconds to read the stuff with the letters scrambled.
Personal observation and various readings in the topic make me pretty confident that context is critical for letter recognition. Whether that means words are recognized as "whole words" or not, the fact is, it very clearly is not a simple, straightforward bottom up "letters then phonemes then syllables then words" recognition process. Recognizing the letters is partly a feedback loop with the words and other parts, as demonstrated by experiments where parts of letters are blacked out. In a recognizable context (i.e. a word) they're still identifiable. Standing alone, they are not.
They interviewed him on NPR yesterday and I thought he said he'd only gotten about 80% of the genome actually mapped.
Horse. Shit.
I can name two instances without even having to think hard where an organization specifically ignored my request. Was it the fault of a stupid employee? So fucking what. I asked, it didn't happen, they called again, I ripped the poor SOB on the other end a new asshole.
I have caller ID. I even have "privacy manager" from SBC. Of course that doesn't help if they call from an identified, but otherwise anonymous number like, say "Illinois call". Or their cellphone. Conveenient how it is that calling card calls from my mother in law also come through as "Illinois call" etc.
I said it before and I'll say it again. If they don't want to implement voluntary opt-in for their harassment, I'm 100% behind government forcing them to accept opt-out on a national scale. I'm not their employer, and I don't owe any of them a job.
I only had to put up ONE "no soliciting" sign on the front door. It's ludicrous to defend a requirement that I effectively have to put one up for every moron individually who might come knocking to sell me something.
Why does this decision/law put us on a slippery slope to "no advertising"?? I don't recall advertising in general to be under any kind of attack. In fact it is the expansion of advertising into the realm of my goddamn dinner hour that makes this an issue at all.
I guess they don't call you at 9:30pm and wake your 1 year old baby. I guess they don't call you and interrupt dinner, which is supposed to be time to spend together as a family (at least in my house). I guess you must not have a life or have magically managed to not get your name on a list to do something like buy a house, have a child, etc. which seems to open the floodgates to those who think you must want to buy something that only they can tell you about and only over the phone.
Oh wait, I guess I could just turn off my phones whenever I don't care right? Too bad I have extended family that sometimes needs to get hold of me at unexpected time.
Things that appear cut and dried to you and me usually have plenty of wiggle room for the enterprising lawyer. My point is that it would have to be crafted very carefully, not just slapped together out of what slashdot readers think makes sense.
Ah, the "we're victims because you won't let us prey on the weak" argument. I wish they'd actually come out and say it that way.
And it would have to be worded pretty interestingly to include protection specifically for a national do-not-call list.
You'd think the morons would recognize the fact that if someone wants to sign up for this list, that means THEY WON'T MAKE A SALE BY CALLING THEM. But no...they have to play the victim like every other half-baked fool in this country.
What's interesting to me is that Illinois is supposed to use the national list as their list. I wonder how that's going to interact with this block.
There has to be a better way. Amending the constitution over such a relatively trivial matter (yes, I'm on the do not call list too, but I can't see how this is a matter of constitutional level import) would be insane.
The same FCC that wants to let three big media companies own all the radio stations and newspapers in the country? That sounds likely.
Isn't this a bed that ICANN created for themselves? While I agree that Verisign is once again proving themselves to be Complete Bastards [tm], seems to me that there's a fair amount of "I Told You So" due to ICANN as well.
I actually hated "The Island..." but most of the rest of Eco's fiction is really good, so comparisons to Eco are reasonable. If you liked Cryptonomicon, I'd recommend you go check out _The Name of the Rose_ and _Foucault's Pendulum_ in particular. Very dense, but excellent writing.
C'mon guys, couldn't you have waited until TOMORROW when the book is actually released? Now I'm gonna have a major case of blueballs waiting to go to the store tomorrow.
I could do with a new respin on Foucault, assuming it's not just the same story....
Right. And then later they import the same bad data from another reporting service that you managed to miss last time. I don't think I have enough time in my life to work for a living, have a family and a house AND chase down every possible avenue of bad information into the credit system and correct them all simultaneously so they don't pollute each other.
Just like we can "clean" our credit records of errors, right? In case you missed it, that statement is dripping with sarcasm. If you've ever tried to fix your credit history you know it's damn near impossible.
- a new motherboard
- probably a new CPU
- a new case, and
- a new graphics card
all in one shot. No more of this reusing everything but the component you want to upgrade stuff!Dunno the rest of those games, but Daikatana was definitely overhyped, right up to the day it shipped at which point it was crucified.