Windows XP is, like, Windows 1.0. I mean, as a 1.0 release, it's still full of bugs - but unlike everything before (besides maybe 2k), at least it's not/complete/ crap (it's useable).
I wait for the day when XP (1.0) is all that's supported, maybe by then personal computing won't still be in the stone age!
Now all one needs to do is modify ones spyware/virus to look similar to FBI's Magic Lantern, and you can avoid detection by virus software. Just great.
As a consumer of standards, I like them because it prevents me from becoming locked in to a solution from any one vendor.
Standards drive adoption.
Lets say a corporation develops some functionality which would be highly usefull to the internet community in general. They would like to see this functionality become widely adopted as a standard, so that it will become widely adopted, with their implementation being one of the first, and hopefully from their POV, defacto.
Currently, this corporation must decide if they are willing to give up any patent rights on their invention in order for it to become standardized and widely adopted. The benefit of standardization and wide adoption is a very strong force in driving corporations to contribute (patent free) the benefits of their R&D to the internet community.
Do you not think that if a corporation can now succeed in having a technology standardized and adopted without forgoing patent rights, that this would result in companies that would otherwise have contributed technology to the community (patent free) changing that stance?
The following is the email I just sent my friends and family....
-----
Hi.
Wow. What a day.
I guess, as a first thing to mention, I'm fine!
I live uptown, on 110st West in Manhattan. The World Trade Center is way downtown on the West side, what would be around -30 st or so, probably 150 blocks from my apartment. I live a few blocks from Columbia university on the one side, and a few from Harlem on the other side (right on the edge of the gentrification of the ghetto).
My roommate Steve works at "Windows", the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. He was not working today. I was doing a pro skate gig for the NY Rangers Hockey team last night, handing out flyers on skates/foot dressed in Rangers jersey - we did this at the World Trade Center, so I was all over that place just last night.
Steve and I were both sleeping this morning at 8:30 when the phone rang, which we ignored and let the answering machine get it, it was Steve's boss who left a message asking if Steve had class today, or if he could come in to work. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Some short time later the phone rang again, it was Steve's mom, and she was like "a plane crashed into the side of the WTC". At that point I jumped out of bed, and yelled for Steve.
We frantically turned on the tv to see the images of the tower in which Steve works on fire. Needless to say we were amazed. At that point, we (and the news) thought it was an accident. Just a few minutes after we started watching, the second plane hit the other building. That is when we were like "that aint no damn accident!!!". Steve was starting to seriously wonder about the health of his coworkers, and how many would have been at work... and that his boss had just called from there, not 15 minutes before it happened.
At this point I was like, why am I watching this on TV...let's put on our inline skates, and go see this first hand (from a very, very safe distance). So we changed Steve's messaging to let his family and friends know he was ok (they thought he might very well be at work in the building). As we were sitting on the front steps, you could see all the police, fire trucks, and ambulances blaring towards downtown. Then we heard what sounded like two gunshots from up the street, and a lady and her kid came running from that direction. It occurred to me at that moment that every police officer on the island of Manhattan was heading downtown, and that there wasn't any left uptown where I was. Anyhow, we skated out around the block the other direction and over to the west side highway bike path, which heads all the way up the west side around the tip of Manhattan.
Anyhow....it took us about half an hour to skate the 100 blocks (5+km or so) up the West side. You can imagine our surprise when the WTC came into view, and there was only ONE tower remaining!!! As we were skating, Steve was like, "what am I going to do for work, it's gonna take them weeks or months to fix that". We started to realize just how serious it was. I had told Steve to bring his radio, so we turned that on and started hearing about the Pentagon and White House stuff. At that point I was like, I'm not going anywhere near any major building. The bike path is right to the west side, and not near anything.
Steve pulled out his camera and we took turns taking a picture of each of us against the backdrop of the burning smoking tower.
So we skated further up against the crowd. At that point, all the people evacuating the lower half of Manhattan were walking up the bike path, along with many people standing around stunned, trying to contact people on their cell phones, which weren't working. The radio was reporting that there were still several planes unaccounted for, which scared us, but then fighter jets started swooping overhead, which made everyone feel a LOT better.
We stopped working our way up just after Chelsea Pier, at 14 st where we then had a good view of the remaining burning tower. We were too far away to see people jumping, but we could see all the flames, and the huge amount of debris in the area felt quite close. I just want to stress that at that point we were still quite some safe distance away, probably about 40 blocks, or two kilometers.
We had stopped to listen to the radio someone had playing out the back of a truck. At that point I saw the second tower start to collapse! I was like "HOLY s@!*&t!!" That site will probably stand as the single most incredible thing I will ever see in my life. It was completely surreal. It was such an amazing thing to see it was like it was a movie or something. I'm sure you have all seen the footage on TV. You could actually see the skeleton of the building come out the top of the rubble, then it fell too. The pictures show a lot, but firsthand was indescribable! The dust cloud looked like what you imagine a nuclear blast would look like....flying outward through the whole lower half of the city between the buildings, and billowing up into the air!
After that, there wasn't much to look at (from that distance) other than a big cloud, so we decided to head back home and tune in the TV again. I imagine from that point on we have all been watching the same footage.
Im still kind of in shock regarding how many people must have died. Having been in that building yesterday...just the thought of how much rubble must be all over the place. And watching all those emergency crews fly past us while we were skating, to find out that many of those people probably died when the second building fell. It's indescribable.
Steve's case is amazing. He so easily could have been at work in that building (on the top floor none the less). The little things in life which determine whether you live or die...it's a thin thread. If your time is up, your time is up. He probably knows 5 good friends who are dead. His boss called from there 15 minutes before!
It's a good thing Steve had left that message saying he was ok, because his phone had 10 messages when we got back, and has been ringing off the hook all day.
I talked to a cop in the pizza shop on the corner tonight, and he said they were now having problems with looting downtown. I mentioned the gunshots I thought we heard, and he said that I didn't have to worry anymore, as everyone was on full alert everywhere now.
Anyhow... the whole city is shut down, and is a complete mess. It will be really interesting to see how this all unfolds over the next few days, weeks and months. It's really scary to be in a city/country where this happens. I'm glad I'm ok. The whole thing is surreal.
Anyhow...I'm ok, that's my story. Back to watching the news...:-)
That's what i'm trying to say, SVG is here NOW! Just because it hasn't yet been ratified as an official standard doesn't mean it isn't a very well implemented and useable tool, today. In fact, the on thing the W3C is waiting for before ratification is implementation experience.
Tools? Here!. Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, Jasc WebDraw, KIllustrator, Gnome's Nautilus/Gill/Dia, and the list goes on and on!
You are right though, when people think of animated web sites, they do think of Flash. I think with time, SVG will change that. SVG is more web-centric, having been desiged around DOM scripting and CSS support is the clincher. If any technology is cool enough to fight the uphill battle againsed Flash, SVG is it. There are even Flash to SVG converters already (see link above).
I am using SVG today, and I am happy with it. Before writing it off, take a day to play around with it and Adobe's plugin (by far the best and most complete implementation/so/far/).
If you haven't played with SVG, I highly recommend taking a look. Not only does it make it easy to author graphics in a text editor, but you can generate them with XSLT, or even better, programatically in code. Besides the powerfull integrated animation features, they expose a DOM so you can script them with Javascript (or eventually in Mozilla with Python, Perl, etc). Let's not forget the main feature, that they are scalable...so they can scale from a handheld screen size, up to a 2025 model 8000x6000 resolution monitor - allowing you to author truly device independent sites. Oh, and like any good web technology they are accessible too, and the text can be extracted from the graphics for text only dispay (you can even copy and paste right off the screen). Another great thing is that you style them with the same CSS style sheets you do your web site, so you can change the colors and styling of your graphics along with your HTML. Oh, and don't forget you can create SVG font files too!
I will also plug Adobe, who if you are running Windows or Mac (not Linux:-(, have released version 2 of their fantastic SVG viewer, which has brilliant conformance for such an emerging standard.
Anyhow, forget Flash, check out SVG!
The web was invented in 1991, and Cacading Style Sheets (CSS1) were standardized in 1996. MSIE6 and Mozilla 1.0 are just getting/close/ to having a full CSS1 implementation this year.
That means it has taken half the total life of the web to get user-agent support for even the most basic of web standards. I was working on the web when CSS1 was standardized, and I remember being so excited and waiting to use them in my web pages. I have been waiting a long time.
But I feel the same way about the standards being released today...SVG for example is really cool and I can't wait to use it. The problem is that many of the specifications coming out today are exponentially or at least logarithmically as complex as the ones that came out earlier. Take a look at XML Schema for a good example of this.
Being burned by my continued wait even for wide spread CSS1 deployment, I shudder to think how long it is going to take to have decent implementations of standards being produced today. I will probably have to wait until 2020 before I can serve up an XML page with inline SVG styled with CSS3.
So yeah, whenever anyone makes an outlandish technology prediction about 10 years from now...I can't help but think about this. I know I am being a cynic. I'm going to shut up and going back to isolating and filing CSS1 bugs and test cases for Mozilla:-)
"Your credit card information may be encrypted and archived in a secure fashion as evidence that the verification was performed. The information is used for no other purpose."
I don't want my credit card information archived at all!!
I just sent the following to Yahoo...
I came today to check out the new Adult section of your shopping site. I would not mind providing my credit card for verification purposes, except for the fact that you/store/ it after I am verified. This is unnaceptable. From a security perspective the odds of my credit and personal information being violated during a transaction are minimal - but the odds of that information being exposed or hacked into increase exponentially if you store the information. I personally spend about $25,000 on-line annually (the majority of my income), but I will not do business with any commerce site which insists on permanently storing my credit card number. Luckily the vast majority of ecommerce sites don't do this. I am sad that Yahoo insists on doing this, because otherwise you would be a vendor who I would trust, use, and recommend to others. And as far as adult materials are concerned, there is a huge lack of trustworthy vendors.
Microsoft continues to integrate the services provided on it's platform. There are many forms to this, such as IE and Media Player integration into the OS, and integration between client and server - which will become much more prevelant with.NET. With this continued integration users are continually being pushed further into making a clean choice between The Microsoft Platform of Integrated Services/Software vs. Everyone Else. When I look into the future I see two separate computing worlds. I see Windows users working with.NET servers and Active Directory, playing encrypted WMA files, surfing IE enhanced web sites, and using Outlook to email Word files to other Exchange users. I see Linux (etc) users working with to Linux servers and CORBA, playing MP3/OGG files, surfing W3C standard web sites, and using Evolution to email other SMTP users. In some sense, the above can be viewed as the Closed vs Open communities.
My question is, do you see this polarization of the user community? Does Microsoft worry that faced with a "this" vs. "that" decision more countries like China and Mexico will choose "that"? And if they choose "that" Microsoft will be so far down it's integrated (or innovative as they call it) path that turning around at that point will be impossible? And possibly lead to the ultimate demise of the company?
If users buy into the Microsoft platform as MS would like, it would necessarily lead to a computing environment built entirely on MS technology. Ignoring the technical advantages and disadvantages to the respective platforms... computing is becoming an ever more pervasive part of our lives, and in that respect we are just getting started (think Jetsons). How do you personally feel about the foundations for mankind's (and your children's) future society being owned and managed by one single for-profit "closed" company? Do you think other peoples answers to this will have bearing on the "this" vs "that" choice of platform?
I would love to see a series based on the Federation timeship Relativity!
On Voyager, episode "Relativity", they were visited by this ship, which was capable of moving through space and time on it's mission of policing the timeline.
The possibilities for exploration on a series such as this would be endless. And it would be so much sexier than a series based on the past. I want way cool new ships and technology and stuff, not more of the same! Though, I could be talked into something to do with the Q, or the Borg:-)
A competing fork/implementation would be good for both the Linus version and the "industry consortium" version.
There is a competing implementation to the Linus kernel! It's called the Alan Cox kernel!
Seriously though...Alan does seem to be a rittle less (un)retentive about letting things into his tree. It's nice that he uses his tree to help with getting these things fixed up, tested, and properly fed into Linus tree. This undeniably helps get things into Linus tree that might not otherwise have been accepted.
If law enforcement can't tell if an image of a crime is real or computer generated, they can not prosecute. It is not just pornographic art that is getting more realistic, it is video games. Nobody had a problem with Wolfenstein 3D, they are starting to have a problem with Quake, and when we all have Doom IIVIIVVVII running on NVidia NV8700 chips you probably won't be able to discern a game demo from a snuff film depicting a real murder. We still shouldn't ban this game. You can not restrict freedom because a crime/may/ be being commited, only when you can/prove/ one is.
It's called "Burden of Proof".
You must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was commited.
Generated/Fake art, no matter how realistic, should not be illegal, because nobody is being/directly/ harmed. Molesting a child certainly should.
I know with good actors and effects I certainly can't effectively discern movie violence from the real thing. If we were to follow your reasoning we would have to ban movies simulating murder, and anything else illegal.
Actually, I am advocating that society pass those laws if and only if we can prove that exposure to virtual child pornography causes regular, non-child-molesting people to become child molesters.
What if we prove playing Quake causes some children to be more agressive? (I think we probably have proven this?) Should we ban Quake?
My point is that there is always someone out there who will be adversly effected by anything of this nature. Someone will kill themselves after listening to Nirvana. Someone will rape their wife after eating an aphrodesiac such as chocolate. Some kid will jump off his 30th floor apartment balcony with a bedsheet after watching base jumping on ESPN. Someone will run through their school with a gun after watching columbine on CNN. And someone will run around killing after playing quake. It is almost a sure thing that someone will molest a child after using some virtual software. The thing is, there are a whole lot of people who won't do these things, and it is not fair to remove their freedoms just because someone else will.
On the other hand, if it does cause this, society has a right (and, indeed, a responsibility) to protect its children. In which case, virtual child porn should probably be illegal.
I disagree with this. It is these types of laws which are the greatest threat to our freedom today. Why should I lose my freedoms because some other twit is succeptable to television/video games/art/whatever?
It's the same argument as gun laws. Just because some other freak uses his gun to kill/rob someone, shouldn't mean I can't own one for hunting or self defence. Just because that freak did it after playing a round of Quake doesn't mean we should ban Quake either.
Just because one pedophile, or even many, commits a crime, doesn't mean we can take freedoms away from the ones who abide by the law.
I have no problem making things illegal that directly infringe on anothers personal rights. I have a big problem taking away personal freedoms, which would otherwise bother nobody, just as a preventative measure because of some slim chance they might provoke someone to do something wrong. If we continue in this direction we will eventually have to ban most everything.
When I was a geek in high school (10 years ago)... it was not cool at all. The computer club was definitely frowned upon by the "cool" people. My question is, with the rise of the internet, and computers becoming pervasive in "normal" peoples lives...has this changed? Or have geeks gained some respect?
I read an article somewhere (Wired?) that said geeks were the new sex symbols...doctors and lawyers used to represent power and success and where what men stereotypically wanted to be, and what women stereotypially chased after. But now, as it is suggested, do you think geeks have invaded some of this position? Do you see any attitudes like this in school?
It is quite simple, Microsoft has put many of the major companies in the software industry out of business. Others have consolidated. If the names Apple, Borland, Corel, Netscape, Novel, Lotus, etc all dissapear off store shelves...how many other big software companies can YOU name? Oracle, IBM, Sun, Adobe,...? The software playing field would start looking rather sparse of players! If you can buy any of your competition using one days interest off cash on hand, who would can you point to as a viable threat then?
Am I the only person who remembers years of UUEncoding large files into small chunks for usenet? It is trivial to work around such a limitation, which makes intentionally adding it in the first place just stupid.
Linux is dead, or might as well be! Sure, some might argue that the Kernel still has life in it, I beg to "pull the plug", and point to Windows 2000 increasing market share. The kernel is suffering feature bloat, and has failed to release a marketable product. Linus and Alan and the rest of the kernel hackers have abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for - and this is the technical term - cool shit.
Reading the comments here amazes me...if someone actually said the above about the kernel...you guys would "rip em' a new one"...but say it about mozilla and people buy in?
It will be done when it's done folks. And when it's done, you can rest assured it will have been done right. That stands for the kernel, and for Mozilla. Dead? Not by a long shot!
"The Mozilla Public License (MPL). This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; unlike the X11 license, it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the MPL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the MPL for this reason."
Mozilla provides a good FAQ on why things have to be the way they do (they are contracturally obligated).
The following is what I posted to the WaSP mailing list: --- Even being a rabid (frothing at times) web standards supporter, I don't like this.
Being heavily involved with the web, I have been following Mozilla extremely closely since the day Netscape released the code. I have downloaded and tinkered with the code, to help understand how things work, and to hopefully/eventually help them fix bugs.
As a software engineer I can say that a modern web browser is probably one of the most complex pieces of software. Period. This letter, and many of the postings on this list, make me feel that the WaSP is a group with many people who don't have enough understanding or appreciation for the complexity required to do what they ask.
A layout manager at the level of HTML 2 is a moderately hard programming task, but doable. HTML 4 is where it gets interesting, tables on their own would be difficult enough. The CSS box model adds a _/significant/_ amount of complexity. CSS2 makes this even harder. CSS2 scriptable via DOM (DHTML)? ECMAScript alone is a monumental undertaking. Dynamic reflow? Then start throwing PNG w. Alpha transparency in, Z-ordering, etc...creating solutions for all these things and rolling them together into one working piece of software...it IS monumental. And implementing it is the classic 10%/90% scenario...the devil is in the details, especially with things like CSS. It's hard enough for a someone to understand the bloody specs, let alone implement them.
The thing that gets me the most is....what do you think they are doing? do you think they are not trying? do you think they don't know that their market share is trickling away by the minute? do you think they aren't already aware that it's been years since 4? or that there browsers very existence very possibly may be on the line? Trust me....they know. If you follow closely you will realize that there is already/massive/ internal pressure on the developers face to get the thing going fast. And they are doing a fantastic job. I drag down a nightly build every couple days. The bugs are ticking away steadily.
The other factor is people. It's easy to say "well, you're this big company with all this money, throw more developers at it" Even forgetting the fact that "more doesn't always equal better, or faster", I don't care if you are AOL, Microsoft, IBM, or whoever...finding developers skilled enough to work with a task that complex is next to impossible in this industry. This list probably has one of the highest levels of, say, CSS know how...how many people here could claim to have an understanding of/all/ of CSS? Not only do the people building it need to be expert web designers (which is enough for most people here to handle on it's own), but they have to be expert programmers as well. I am still grappling with understanding CSS2 and looking at the code, and thinking about how one would do some of the things the specs ask for...it scares me. I really respect what they have done. It's no coincidence that Mozilla rocks most the competition on their standards support, they really do have a Next Generation layout...and it's still in it's first iteration.
And who is the WaSP to make demands on/their/ timeline? I mean, for me, sure...I think it's all fine and dandy to say to the browser manufacturers "if you make a _web_ browser, please make it support _web_ standards, this is a community whose value is in interoperability, and we would like you to support that interoperability". But I draw the line before making demands on/their/ timeline. It's/their/ bloody product...they can take damn well as long as they want and WaSP can just bloody well wait. Being that it's/their/ product, they can also innovate however they want, and prioritize however they want - Netscape has been kind enough to publicly state that they have prioritized on standards. Be thankful Netscape is building a/free/ (as in speech) browser for you at all. And the free software community is very simple...if you want it done faster... help! (put your money where your mouth is), or at least show some bloody gratitude already.
I would like to take this opportunity to say to the people at Netscape and Mozilla. Thank you for seeing the error of your ways, and doing your best to deliver a standards compliant product. Thank you for what I see as a tremendous amount of effort over the last year to Do The Right Thing. Thank you for spending an enormous amount of resources building something you are/giving/ to the software community. Thank you for helping build and support an/open/ community around your offering so that I can see things progress, and help is whatever way I can. I appreciate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 9x/Me were Alpha releases of Windows.
Windows 2000 was a beta.
Windows XP is, like, Windows 1.0. I mean, as a 1.0 release, it's still full of bugs - but unlike everything before (besides maybe 2k), at least it's not
I wait for the day when XP (1.0) is all that's supported, maybe by then personal computing won't still be in the stone age!
Uhh...why not hack McAffe to find the signature it's looking for?
Now all one needs to do is modify ones spyware/virus to look similar to FBI's Magic Lantern, and you can avoid detection by virus software. Just great.
As a consumer of standards, I like them because it prevents me from becoming locked in to a solution from any one vendor.
Standards drive adoption.
Lets say a corporation develops some functionality which would be highly usefull to the internet community in general. They would like to see this functionality become widely adopted as a standard, so that it will become widely adopted, with their implementation being one of the first, and hopefully from their POV, defacto.
Currently, this corporation must decide if they are willing to give up any patent rights on their invention in order for it to become standardized and widely adopted. The benefit of standardization and wide adoption is a very strong force in driving corporations to contribute (patent free) the benefits of their R&D to the internet community.
Do you not think that if a corporation can now succeed in having a technology standardized and adopted without forgoing patent rights, that this would result in companies that would otherwise have contributed technology to the community (patent free) changing that stance?
The following is the email I just sent my friends and family....
:-)
-----
Hi.
Wow. What a day.
I guess, as a first thing to mention, I'm fine!
I live uptown, on 110st West in Manhattan. The World Trade Center is way downtown on the West side, what would be around -30 st or so, probably 150 blocks from my apartment. I live a few blocks from Columbia university on the one side, and a few from Harlem on the other side (right on the edge of the gentrification of the ghetto).
My roommate Steve works at "Windows", the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. He was not working today. I was doing a pro skate gig for the NY Rangers Hockey team last night, handing out flyers on skates/foot dressed in Rangers jersey - we did this at the World Trade Center, so I was all over that place just last night.
Steve and I were both sleeping this morning at 8:30 when the phone rang, which we ignored and let the answering machine get it, it was Steve's boss who left a message asking if Steve had class today, or if he could come in to work. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Some short time later the phone rang again, it was Steve's mom, and she was like "a plane crashed into the side of the WTC". At that point I jumped out of bed, and yelled for Steve.
We frantically turned on the tv to see the images of the tower in which Steve works on fire. Needless to say we were amazed. At that point, we (and the news) thought it was an accident. Just a few minutes after we started watching, the second plane hit the other building. That is when we were like "that aint no damn accident!!!". Steve was starting to seriously wonder about the health of his coworkers, and how many would have been at work... and that his boss had just called from there, not 15 minutes before it happened.
At this point I was like, why am I watching this on TV...let's put on our inline skates, and go see this first hand (from a very, very safe distance). So we changed Steve's messaging to let his family and friends know he was ok (they thought he might very well be at work in the building). As we were sitting on the front steps, you could see all the police, fire trucks, and ambulances blaring towards downtown. Then we heard what sounded like two gunshots from up the street, and a lady and her kid came running from that direction. It occurred to me at that moment that every police officer on the island of Manhattan was heading downtown, and that there wasn't any left uptown where I was. Anyhow, we skated out around the block the other direction and over to the west side highway bike path, which heads all the way up the west side around the tip of Manhattan.
Anyhow....it took us about half an hour to skate the 100 blocks (5+km or so) up the West side. You can imagine our surprise when the WTC came into view, and there was only ONE tower remaining!!! As we were skating, Steve was like, "what am I going to do for work, it's gonna take them weeks or months to fix that". We started to realize just how serious it was. I had told Steve to bring his radio, so we turned that on and started hearing about the Pentagon and White House stuff. At that point I was like, I'm not going anywhere near any major building. The bike path is right to the west side, and not near anything.
Steve pulled out his camera and we took turns taking a picture of each of us against the backdrop of the burning smoking tower.
So we skated further up against the crowd. At that point, all the people evacuating the lower half of Manhattan were walking up the bike path, along with many people standing around stunned, trying to contact people on their cell phones, which weren't working. The radio was reporting that there were still several planes unaccounted for, which scared us, but then fighter jets started swooping overhead, which made everyone feel a LOT better.
We stopped working our way up just after Chelsea Pier, at 14 st where we then had a good view of the remaining burning tower. We were too far away to see people jumping, but we could see all the flames, and the huge amount of debris in the area felt quite close. I just want to stress that at that point we were still quite some safe distance away, probably about 40 blocks, or two kilometers.
We had stopped to listen to the radio someone had playing out the back of a truck. At that point I saw the second tower start to collapse! I was like "HOLY s@!*&t!!" That site will probably stand as the single most incredible thing I will ever see in my life. It was completely surreal. It was such an amazing thing to see it was like it was a movie or something. I'm sure you have all seen the footage on TV. You could actually see the skeleton of the building come out the top of the rubble, then it fell too. The pictures show a lot, but firsthand was indescribable! The dust cloud looked like what you imagine a nuclear blast would look like....flying outward through the whole lower half of the city between the buildings, and billowing up into the air!
After that, there wasn't much to look at (from that distance) other than a big cloud, so we decided to head back home and tune in the TV again. I imagine from that point on we have all been watching the same footage.
Im still kind of in shock regarding how many people must have died. Having been in that building yesterday...just the thought of how much rubble must be all over the place. And watching all those emergency crews fly past us while we were skating, to find out that many of those people probably died when the second building fell. It's indescribable.
Steve's case is amazing. He so easily could have been at work in that building (on the top floor none the less). The little things in life which determine whether you live or die...it's a thin thread. If your time is up, your time is up. He probably knows 5 good friends who are dead. His boss called from there 15 minutes before!
It's a good thing Steve had left that message saying he was ok, because his phone had 10 messages when we got back, and has been ringing off the hook all day.
I talked to a cop in the pizza shop on the corner tonight, and he said they were now having problems with looting downtown. I mentioned the gunshots I thought we heard, and he said that I didn't have to worry anymore, as everyone was on full alert everywhere now.
Anyhow... the whole city is shut down, and is a complete mess. It will be really interesting to see how this all unfolds over the next few days, weeks and months. It's really scary to be in a city/country where this happens. I'm glad I'm ok. The whole thing is surreal.
Anyhow...I'm ok, that's my story. Back to watching the news...
Wow!
Dear Mr. Stallman:
Can you tell me how to get Hurd running on a Linux system?
ROT-13???
Hell, publish it as an Adobe E-book
The next step:
Everything Over Freenet
Of course the US didn't /really/ spend $100 Billion to go to Mars. Where else do you think the money comes from to pay for stuff like Echelon? :-)
That's what i'm trying to say, SVG is here NOW! Just because it hasn't yet been ratified as an official standard doesn't mean it isn't a very well implemented and useable tool, today. In fact, the on thing the W3C is waiting for before ratification is implementation experience.
Tools? Here!. Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, Jasc WebDraw, KIllustrator, Gnome's Nautilus/Gill/Dia, and the list goes on and on!
You are right though, when people think of animated web sites, they do think of Flash. I think with time, SVG will change that. SVG is more web-centric, having been desiged around DOM scripting and CSS support is the clincher. If any technology is cool enough to fight the uphill battle againsed Flash, SVG is it. There are even Flash to SVG converters already (see link above).
I am using SVG today, and I am happy with it. Before writing it off, take a day to play around with it and Adobe's plugin (by far the best and most complete implementation /so/far/).
SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics. :-).
:-(, have released version 2 of their fantastic SVG viewer, which has brilliant conformance for such an emerging standard.
Graphics in XML, and is a standard from the W3C (or will be soon
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8
If you haven't played with SVG, I highly recommend taking a look. Not only does it make it easy to author graphics in a text editor, but you can generate them with XSLT, or even better, programatically in code. Besides the powerfull integrated animation features, they expose a DOM so you can script them with Javascript (or eventually in Mozilla with Python, Perl, etc). Let's not forget the main feature, that they are scalable...so they can scale from a handheld screen size, up to a 2025 model 8000x6000 resolution monitor - allowing you to author truly device independent sites. Oh, and like any good web technology they are accessible too, and the text can be extracted from the graphics for text only dispay (you can even copy and paste right off the screen). Another great thing is that you style them with the same CSS style sheets you do your web site, so you can change the colors and styling of your graphics along with your HTML. Oh, and don't forget you can create SVG font files too!
I will also plug Adobe, who if you are running Windows or Mac (not Linux
Anyhow, forget Flash, check out SVG!
Ok, let's look at the technology.
/close/ to having a full CSS1 implementation this year.
:-)
The web was invented in 1991, and Cacading Style Sheets (CSS1) were standardized in 1996. MSIE6 and Mozilla 1.0 are just getting
That means it has taken half the total life of the web to get user-agent support for even the most basic of web standards. I was working on the web when CSS1 was standardized, and I remember being so excited and waiting to use them in my web pages. I have been waiting a long time.
But I feel the same way about the standards being released today...SVG for example is really cool and I can't wait to use it. The problem is that many of the specifications coming out today are exponentially or at least logarithmically as complex as the ones that came out earlier. Take a look at XML Schema for a good example of this.
Being burned by my continued wait even for wide spread CSS1 deployment, I shudder to think how long it is going to take to have decent implementations of standards being produced today. I will probably have to wait until 2020 before I can serve up an XML page with inline SVG styled with CSS3.
So yeah, whenever anyone makes an outlandish technology prediction about 10 years from now...I can't help but think about this. I know I am being a cynic. I'm going to shut up and going back to isolating and filing CSS1 bugs and test cases for Mozilla
From their Credit Card Verification FAQ:
/store/ it after I am verified. This is unnaceptable. From a security perspective the odds of my credit and personal information being violated during a transaction are minimal - but the odds of that information being exposed or hacked into increase exponentially if you store the information. I personally spend about $25,000 on-line annually (the majority of my income), but I will not do business with any commerce site which insists on permanently storing my credit card number. Luckily the vast majority of ecommerce sites don't do this. I am sad that Yahoo insists on doing this, because otherwise you would be a vendor who I would trust, use, and recommend to others. And as far as adult materials are concerned, there is a huge lack of trustworthy vendors.
"Your credit card information may be encrypted and archived in a secure fashion as evidence that the verification was performed. The information is used for no other purpose."
I don't want my credit card information archived at all!!
I just sent the following to Yahoo...
I came today to check out the new Adult section of your shopping site. I would not mind providing my credit card for verification purposes, except for the fact that you
Microsoft continues to integrate the services provided on it's platform. There are many forms to this, such as IE and Media Player integration into the OS, and integration between client and server - which will become much more prevelant with .NET. With this continued integration users are continually being pushed further into making a clean choice between The Microsoft Platform of Integrated Services/Software vs. Everyone Else. When I look into the future I see two separate computing worlds. I see Windows users working with .NET servers and Active Directory, playing encrypted WMA files, surfing IE enhanced web sites, and using Outlook to email Word files to other Exchange users. I see Linux (etc) users working with to Linux servers and CORBA, playing MP3/OGG files, surfing W3C standard web sites, and using Evolution to email other SMTP users. In some sense, the above can be viewed as the Closed vs Open communities.
My question is, do you see this polarization of the user community? Does Microsoft worry that faced with a "this" vs. "that" decision more countries like China and Mexico will choose "that"? And if they choose "that" Microsoft will be so far down it's integrated (or innovative as they call it) path that turning around at that point will be impossible? And possibly lead to the ultimate demise of the company?
If users buy into the Microsoft platform as MS would like, it would necessarily lead to a computing environment built entirely on MS technology. Ignoring the technical advantages and disadvantages to the respective platforms... computing is becoming an ever more pervasive part of our lives, and in that respect we are just getting started (think Jetsons). How do you personally feel about the foundations for mankind's (and your children's) future society being owned and managed by one single for-profit "closed" company? Do you think other peoples answers to this will have bearing on the "this" vs "that" choice of platform?
Thank You.
I would love to see a series based on the Federation timeship Relativity!
On Voyager, episode "Relativity", they were visited by this ship, which was capable of moving through space and time on it's mission of policing the timeline.
The possibilities for exploration on a series such as this would be endless. And it would be so much sexier than a series based on the past. I want way cool new ships and technology and stuff, not more of the same! Though, I could be talked into something to do with the Q, or the Borg :-)
There is a competing implementation to the Linus kernel! It's called the Alan Cox kernel!
Seriously though...Alan does seem to be a rittle less (un)retentive about letting things into his tree. It's nice that he uses his tree to help with getting these things fixed up, tested, and properly fed into Linus tree. This undeniably helps get things into Linus tree that might not otherwise have been accepted.
If law enforcement can't tell if an image of a crime is real or computer generated, they can not prosecute. It is not just pornographic art that is getting more realistic, it is video games. Nobody had a problem with Wolfenstein 3D, they are starting to have a problem with Quake, and when we all have Doom IIVIIVVVII running on NVidia NV8700 chips you probably won't be able to discern a game demo from a snuff film depicting a real murder. We still shouldn't ban this game. You can not restrict freedom because a crime /may/ be being commited, only when you can /prove/ one is.
/directly/ harmed. Molesting a child certainly should.
It's called "Burden of Proof".
You must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was commited.
Generated/Fake art, no matter how realistic, should not be illegal, because nobody is being
I know with good actors and effects I certainly can't effectively discern movie violence from the real thing. If we were to follow your reasoning we would have to ban movies simulating murder, and anything else illegal.
What if we prove playing Quake causes some children to be more agressive? (I think we probably have proven this?) Should we ban Quake?
My point is that there is always someone out there who will be adversly effected by anything of this nature. Someone will kill themselves after listening to Nirvana. Someone will rape their wife after eating an aphrodesiac such as chocolate. Some kid will jump off his 30th floor apartment balcony with a bedsheet after watching base jumping on ESPN. Someone will run through their school with a gun after watching columbine on CNN. And someone will run around killing after playing quake. It is almost a sure thing that someone will molest a child after using some virtual software. The thing is, there are a whole lot of people who won't do these things, and it is not fair to remove their freedoms just because someone else will.
I disagree with this. It is these types of laws which are the greatest threat to our freedom today. Why should I lose my freedoms because some other twit is succeptable to television/video games/art/whatever?
It's the same argument as gun laws. Just because some other freak uses his gun to kill/rob someone, shouldn't mean I can't own one for hunting or self defence. Just because that freak did it after playing a round of Quake doesn't mean we should ban Quake either.
Just because one pedophile, or even many, commits a crime, doesn't mean we can take freedoms away from the ones who abide by the law.
I have no problem making things illegal that directly infringe on anothers personal rights. I have a big problem taking away personal freedoms, which would otherwise bother nobody, just as a preventative measure because of some slim chance they might provoke someone to do something wrong. If we continue in this direction we will eventually have to ban most everything.
When I was a geek in high school (10 years ago)... it was not cool at all. The computer club was definitely frowned upon by the "cool" people. My question is, with the rise of the internet, and computers becoming pervasive in "normal" peoples lives...has this changed? Or have geeks gained some respect?
I read an article somewhere (Wired?) that said geeks were the new sex symbols...doctors and lawyers used to represent power and success and where what men stereotypically wanted to be, and what women stereotypially chased after. But now, as it is suggested, do you think geeks have invaded some of this position? Do you see any attitudes like this in school?
It is quite simple, Microsoft has put many of the major companies in the software industry out of business. Others have consolidated. If the names Apple, Borland, Corel, Netscape, Novel, Lotus, etc all dissapear off store shelves...how many other big software companies can YOU name? Oracle, IBM, Sun, Adobe, ...? The software playing field would start looking rather sparse of players! If you can buy any of your competition using one days interest off cash on hand, who would can you point to as a viable threat then?
Am I the only person who remembers years of UUEncoding large files into small chunks for usenet? It is trivial to work around such a limitation, which makes intentionally adding it in the first place just stupid.
Feature Creep? Delayed release? Dead?
We must be talking about the Linux Kernel!!!
Linux is dead, or might as well be! Sure, some might argue that the Kernel still has life in it, I beg to "pull the plug", and point to Windows 2000 increasing market share. The kernel is suffering feature bloat, and has failed to release a marketable product. Linus and Alan and the rest of the kernel hackers have abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for - and this is the technical term - cool shit.
Reading the comments here amazes me...if someone actually said the above about the kernel...you guys would "rip em' a new one"...but say it about mozilla and people buy in?
It will be done when it's done folks. And when it's done, you can rest assured it will have been done right. That stands for the kernel, and for Mozilla. Dead? Not by a long shot!
It IS a free software licence. Don't get me wrong, it is not the best licence by any means, but it is free.
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/licen se-list.html
"The Mozilla Public License (MPL).
This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; unlike the X11 license, it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the MPL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the MPL for this reason."
Mozilla provides a good FAQ on why things have to be the way they do (they are contracturally obligated).
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/FAQ.html
The following is what I posted to the WaSP mailing list:
/massive/ internal pressure on the developers face to get the thing going fast. And they are doing a fantastic job. I drag down a nightly build every couple days. The bugs are ticking away steadily.
/all/ of CSS? Not only do the people building it need to be expert web designers (which is enough for most people here to handle on it's own), but they have to be expert programmers as well. I am still grappling with understanding CSS2 and looking at the code, and thinking about how one would do some of the things the specs ask for...it scares me. I really respect what they have done. It's no coincidence that Mozilla rocks most the competition on their standards support, they really do have a Next Generation layout...and it's still in it's first iteration.
/their/ timeline? I mean, for me, sure...I think it's all fine and dandy to say to the browser manufacturers "if you make a _web_ browser, please make it support _web_ standards, this is a community whose value is in interoperability, and we would like you to support that interoperability". But I draw the line before making demands on /their/ timeline. It's /their/ bloody product...they can take damn well as long as they want and WaSP can just bloody well wait. Being that it's /their/ product, they can also innovate however they want, and prioritize however they want - Netscape has been kind enough to publicly state that they have prioritized on standards. Be thankful Netscape is building a /free/ (as in speech) browser for you at all. And the free software community is very simple...if you want it done faster... help! (put your money where your mouth is), or at least show some bloody gratitude already.
/giving/ to the software community. Thank you for helping build and support an /open/ community around your offering so that I can see things progress, and help is whatever way I can. I appreciate it.
---
Even being a rabid (frothing at times) web standards supporter, I don't like this.
Being heavily involved with the web, I have been following Mozilla extremely closely since the day Netscape released the code. I have downloaded and tinkered with the code, to help understand how things work, and to hopefully/eventually help them fix bugs.
As a software engineer I can say that a modern web browser is probably one of the most complex pieces of software. Period. This letter, and many of the postings on this list, make me feel that the WaSP is a group with many people who don't have enough understanding or appreciation for the complexity required to do what they ask.
A layout manager at the level of HTML 2 is a moderately hard programming task, but doable. HTML 4 is where it gets interesting, tables on their own would be difficult enough. The CSS box model adds a _/significant/_ amount of complexity. CSS2 makes this even harder. CSS2 scriptable via DOM (DHTML)? ECMAScript alone is a monumental undertaking. Dynamic reflow? Then start throwing PNG w. Alpha transparency in, Z-ordering, etc...creating solutions for all these things and rolling them together into one working piece of software...it IS monumental. And implementing it is the classic 10%/90% scenario...the devil is in the details, especially with things like CSS. It's hard enough for a someone to understand the bloody specs, let alone implement them.
The thing that gets me the most is....what do you think they are doing? do you think they are not trying? do you think they don't know that their market share is trickling away by the minute? do you think they aren't already aware that it's been years since 4? or that there browsers very existence very possibly may be on the line? Trust me....they know. If you follow closely you will realize that there is already
The other factor is people. It's easy to say "well, you're this big company with all this money, throw more developers at it" Even forgetting the fact that "more doesn't always equal better, or faster", I don't care if you are AOL, Microsoft, IBM, or whoever...finding developers skilled enough to work with a task
that complex is next to impossible in this industry. This list probably has one of the highest levels of, say, CSS know how...how many people here could claim to have an understanding of
And who is the WaSP to make demands on
I would like to take this opportunity to say to the people at Netscape and Mozilla. Thank you for seeing the error of your ways, and doing your best to deliver a standards compliant product. Thank you for what I see as a tremendous amount of effort over the last year to Do The Right Thing. Thank you for spending an enormous amount of resources building something you are