The most pointless one was "kryptonite." It has no scientific importance, and the rock in question doesn't have any of the properties of kryptonite -- it was just a coincidence in naming.
Someone involved with the movie "Superman Returns" decided to make up a name for a mineral because the plot had Lex Luthor stealing it from a museum. They used a standard mineral naming scheme. Then someone happened to find a mineral that matched the description.
At least the "transparent aluminum" a while back was actually transparent.
It may be worth noting that Superman is a DC Comics character, and DC is owned by Time Warner.
The way I look at it is that, structurally, the series is only 6 novels long. Books 1-5, and then one really long novel that starts with book 6 and will run through book 12.
Plus the prequel, which is vastly superior to any of books 6-9. I let myself get talked into reading it, and my reaction was basically, "Whoa, Wheel of Time is interesting again!"
In the early books, even a few Trollocs or single Myrrdraal was an issue. By the middle books, they were being beaten up by farmwives with kitchen implements. By the late books, hundreds of them aren't really a big deal. A shame really, as when you lose respect for the foes, the series loses a lot of depth.
Related to that, there's a point around book 5 where the nature of the enemy (or at least the enemy cannon fodder) changes. For the first few books, it's mostly Trollocs and Myrrdraal -- literally faceless and bestial. But then the various Aiel factions rise to prominence, and the Seanchan, and nations are going around making alliances and conquering each other with armies. Suddenly the enemies have a face, and are all too human. It changes the dynamic considerably.
Each potter book, some of which are 800+ pages) only translate into 2 hour movies.
Rather choppily, I'm afraid. The last two movies were rushed Cliff Notes versions of the books, showing the high points without any sort of through line. As visuals to go with the books, they were okay, but as stand-alone movies, they would have benefited from an extra 30-60 minutes to follow through on elements and connect them, instead of just presenting them staccato. Whether the target audience would have been willing to sit still for 3 hours is another question.
In my experience, whenever an author introduces some long lost culture from across the sea bent on conquering the known lands, the series should have ended because the author obviously had nothing more to say.
So you're saying it should have ended with the first book, then? The Seanchan make their appearance in book 2.
In any case, the problem isn't with browsers being too permissive. The problem is that IE doesn't support the various web standards to the same level that other browsers do. If IE renders the CSS, SVG, XHTML, etc. specs properly but degrades gracefully when it gets a non-compliant page, that is fine with me.
Actually, the difference between various browsers' error-recovery algorithms is a fairly big part of the problem... but only in the sense that the browsers are being used by the developers for debugging. If there were some sort of "developer mode" which would provide extremely useful debugging tools, but only on well-formed code (and making well-formedness the requirement instead of actual validation keeps it open to future versions of HTML/CSS), it might accomplish the same thing without causing problems for end users visiting existing websites.
Higher insurance rates / costs from accidents don't damage the economy, they actually contribute to it. You may not be happy paying $100 more to your insurance that you could put elsewhere, but its certainly not hurting the economy at all. If anything, the bugs in IE contribute to the economy, as more money is required to move through the system to account for them.
Sounds like the broken window fallacy to me. This doesn't add any money to the system unless the victims are all misers. At best, it simply diverts it from one path to another.
In many ways, IE7 disappointed people. Many users don't like the changed interface. It has compatibility problems with IE6-only sites & apps. (Why this surprised anyone, I don't know.) And web developers wanted it to go much further beyond IE6's capabilities than it ultimately did. So I can buy the idea that they don't want to get people's expectations up too far.
But there are many possible degrees of transparency. You don't have to take the Mozilla approach where every little change is visible to the public. Over the past year or two, Opera has managed to do a good job of keeping people aware that new stuff is coming down the pike without actually giving away the goods before their announcements.
Sure, sometimes it means that reaction is a bit underwhelmed when people build up some huge expectation over a hinted-at feature, and it turns out to be something much more mundane (Opera Link, for example -- incredibly useful, but in its current form not revolutionary). But anyone following Opera developers' blogs can tell that yes, they're working on the next version, and could pick up some vague clues as to some of the planned features and capabilities.
With IE8, no one without an NDA knew whether Microsoft had spent a year on design, a year on coding, or just took a year off. The IE8 blog asked us not to take silence for inaction, but what else should we have assumed?
The actual number of people who edit Wikipedia from that range (besides Bagley) is very likely 0.
But the article opens with a story about just such a user. That means at least 1 person who was not Bagley has tried to edit from that range. Even the screenshot (asuming it's accurate) states that the range was "actually (and almost exclusively) used by them" (emphasis added), implying that other users had been seen coming from that range. Are you really that confident that no one on a given residential network will want to edit Wikipedia over the next however-many months?
While I agree that the response was excessive (banning 1K IPs to block one user's actions), I have a hard time feeling sympathy for someone who thought it would be a good idea to send spyware to the person to whom he was appealing. That doesn't seem like a good strategy.
So, you have proved that an intelligent designer can design a system where evolution occurs. Now, how does that relate to demonstrating that evolution occurs in a system without a designer?
I thought the whole premise of intelligent design was that a designer must have been involved in the process, designing specific structures that could not arise on their own. Suggesting that a designer set up the framework (fundamental forces, amount of matter vs. antimatter, etc.), then sat back and watched without interfering, is an entirely different proposition.
Just out of curiosity, were you intending to respond to another post? 'Cause the GP was talking about not supporting IE6 (not IE7) on an internal site where he knew there wouldn't be any IE6 users.
And on a completely different note, the name is Firefox, not FireFox. Just one capital letter. Sorry, but it bugs me as much as people writing MicroSoft instead of Microsoft -- it just looks wrong. (Though in MS's case, I seem to recall that the mixed-case spelling was the official name 30-odd years ago.)
I read the article and it stated that the crater in question was of a lower resolution with different lighting angles, taken from a 1994 image. So that does hint at some sort of deliberate manipulation.
No, that's not what the article said. People were claiming that the whole photo was copied from the 1994 image, and the analyst determined that couldn't be the case because of the lighting angles and resolution.
The "new" crater appears to have been moved from another portion of the current image, close enough that a stitching error could explain it. Lakdawalla's own post. linked from the article, describes her analysis in more detail. The image is stitched together from smaller photos, and there are other features near the crater which don't match the older US photo. She worked out where the seam probably was, slid the image along it, and everything lined up.
Exactly how can you accidentally open up Photoshop and move a crater from one place to another?
By taking 2 -- or in this case 19 -- photos that cover different parts of an area, stitching them together to make one big photo, and making a mistake with the positioning on one of the pieces.
You did read the actual article before rebutting to a comment that told you the summary was inaccurate, right?
Except it doesn't appear to be a correct analysis. I can easily see the difference in the lighting and composition, but there still appears to be an extra/moved crater in the Chinese photo.
Two issues:
Is it copied?
What's up with the new crater?
The analysis concluded that it's not copied, and concluded that the moved crater can be explained by a mistake stitching the components together. If you look at that article, you'll note that the new image is missing a small crater in one place, and has an extra small crater a little ways away, and there's an odd indentation around it. She figured out where the seam probably was, shifted the parts a bit, and they line up perfectly.
That was the initial explanation for the "new" feature, though as Bad Astronomy pointed out, since it's on the near side of the moon, the impact probably would have been observed. However, the actual article (unlike the misleading summary) states that it can be explained by a botched job stitching together the components of the mosaic.
Do they publish all the bugs that got found internally?
Have you considered reading the article?
At Mozilla we fix our bugs openly. When you count Mozilla security bugs you are seeing not just those that are reported externally, but also the ones that would be considered internal if we acted like most other software vendors.
In other words, yes, they fix bugs internally and publish them.
One thing that worries me about Firefox being open sourced is that hackers are basically "gifted" with the information about the security holes in previous versions... In this respect, for me, closed source is more secure. I'm not claiming that it means IE is more secure, merely that the hackers have to put a fair bit of effort in to find the holes instead of Firefox's "We've fixed the bug that's in version 2.xx - here it is."
It's not a significant advantage, though. If you look at the most high-profile attacks over the last few years, a lot of them weren't developed by bad guys looking at source code or even by messing around with the program itself. They were developed after Microsoft released a patch, and the bad guys looked at it to see what the patch changed and reverse-engineer what was vulnerable about the previous version.
That tactic will work with any program, whether the source is available or not, and the hackers are quite willing to expend the effort. It seems like within days of any patch announcement, someone has come up with an exploit for it. So whether the source is open or closed, users of old versions are going to be more vulnerable after the fix is released than they were before.
As far as updating goes, many users seem just as bad at updating their closed-source software as they are at updating their open-source software (if they have any). Even when auto-update is available, as in Windows, Mac OS X, or Adobe Reader, many people leave it off or skip it.
The earliest version of IE you can get support for is 5.0, released in 1998. InfoSpan, the leading company providing Firefox support, will do phone support for version 0.9, released in 1999. So IE has about a year on them.
Firefox 0.9 only goes back to 2004. Even Mozilla 0.9 only goes back as far as 2001.
and *.99 price forces the cashier to open the til, I've heard, rather than just to pocket the round £10 (or dollars or whatever)
Depends on whether sales tax/VAT are included in the price. Here in the US (or at least in California), sales tax is rarely included in the advertised price. So a round $10.00 on a price tag or menu is still going to end up as a (for example) $10.78 transaction. Under those circumstances, setting the price at $9.99 doesn't make a difference in whether the clerk needs to make change or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The most pointless one was "kryptonite." It has no scientific importance, and the rock in question doesn't have any of the properties of kryptonite -- it was just a coincidence in naming.
Someone involved with the movie "Superman Returns" decided to make up a name for a mineral because the plot had Lex Luthor stealing it from a museum. They used a standard mineral naming scheme. Then someone happened to find a mineral that matched the description.
At least the "transparent aluminum" a while back was actually transparent.
It may be worth noting that Superman is a DC Comics character, and DC is owned by Time Warner.
The way I look at it is that, structurally, the series is only 6 novels long. Books 1-5, and then one really long novel that starts with book 6 and will run through book 12.
Plus the prequel, which is vastly superior to any of books 6-9. I let myself get talked into reading it, and my reaction was basically, "Whoa, Wheel of Time is interesting again!"
Related to that, there's a point around book 5 where the nature of the enemy (or at least the enemy cannon fodder) changes. For the first few books, it's mostly Trollocs and Myrrdraal -- literally faceless and bestial. But then the various Aiel factions rise to prominence, and the Seanchan, and nations are going around making alliances and conquering each other with armies. Suddenly the enemies have a face, and are all too human. It changes the dynamic considerably.
Rather choppily, I'm afraid. The last two movies were rushed Cliff Notes versions of the books, showing the high points without any sort of through line. As visuals to go with the books, they were okay, but as stand-alone movies, they would have benefited from an extra 30-60 minutes to follow through on elements and connect them, instead of just presenting them staccato. Whether the target audience would have been willing to sit still for 3 hours is another question.
So you're saying it should have ended with the first book, then? The Seanchan make their appearance in book 2.
Jordan was already planning to make this book the final one.
Actually, the last 2 books really picked up steam as he started moving toward the conclusion.
Books 6 through 9, however, were pretty tedious.
Actually, the difference between various browsers' error-recovery algorithms is a fairly big part of the problem... but only in the sense that the browsers are being used by the developers for debugging. If there were some sort of "developer mode" which would provide extremely useful debugging tools, but only on well-formed code (and making well-formedness the requirement instead of actual validation keeps it open to future versions of HTML/CSS), it might accomplish the same thing without causing problems for end users visiting existing websites.
Umm... that was pretty much my point. Are you sure you didn't mean to respond to one of the other comments?
Sounds like the broken window fallacy to me. This doesn't add any money to the system unless the victims are all misers. At best, it simply diverts it from one path to another.
In many ways, IE7 disappointed people. Many users don't like the changed interface. It has compatibility problems with IE6-only sites & apps. (Why this surprised anyone, I don't know.) And web developers wanted it to go much further beyond IE6's capabilities than it ultimately did. So I can buy the idea that they don't want to get people's expectations up too far.
But there are many possible degrees of transparency. You don't have to take the Mozilla approach where every little change is visible to the public. Over the past year or two, Opera has managed to do a good job of keeping people aware that new stuff is coming down the pike without actually giving away the goods before their announcements.
Sure, sometimes it means that reaction is a bit underwhelmed when people build up some huge expectation over a hinted-at feature, and it turns out to be something much more mundane (Opera Link, for example -- incredibly useful, but in its current form not revolutionary). But anyone following Opera developers' blogs can tell that yes, they're working on the next version, and could pick up some vague clues as to some of the planned features and capabilities.
With IE8, no one without an NDA knew whether Microsoft had spent a year on design, a year on coding, or just took a year off. The IE8 blog asked us not to take silence for inaction, but what else should we have assumed?
But the article opens with a story about just such a user. That means at least 1 person who was not Bagley has tried to edit from that range. Even the screenshot (asuming it's accurate) states that the range was "actually (and almost exclusively) used by them" (emphasis added), implying that other users had been seen coming from that range. Are you really that confident that no one on a given residential network will want to edit Wikipedia over the next however-many months?
While I agree that the response was excessive (banning 1K IPs to block one user's actions), I have a hard time feeling sympathy for someone who thought it would be a good idea to send spyware to the person to whom he was appealing. That doesn't seem like a good strategy.
I thought the whole premise of intelligent design was that a designer must have been involved in the process, designing specific structures that could not arise on their own. Suggesting that a designer set up the framework (fundamental forces, amount of matter vs. antimatter, etc.), then sat back and watched without interfering, is an entirely different proposition.
Just out of curiosity, were you intending to respond to another post? 'Cause the GP was talking about not supporting IE6 (not IE7) on an internal site where he knew there wouldn't be any IE6 users.
And on a completely different note, the name is Firefox, not FireFox. Just one capital letter. Sorry, but it bugs me as much as people writing MicroSoft instead of Microsoft -- it just looks wrong. (Though in MS's case, I seem to recall that the mixed-case spelling was the official name 30-odd years ago.)
Not only that, but the post office will probably prefer that solution to actually charging them the extra 17 cents to hand-sort.
Compare:
Cover the cost of extra work
vs.
Eliminate extra work
No, that's not what the article said. People were claiming that the whole photo was copied from the 1994 image, and the analyst determined that couldn't be the case because of the lighting angles and resolution.
The "new" crater appears to have been moved from another portion of the current image, close enough that a stitching error could explain it. Lakdawalla's own post. linked from the article, describes her analysis in more detail. The image is stitched together from smaller photos, and there are other features near the crater which don't match the older US photo. She worked out where the seam probably was, slid the image along it, and everything lined up.
By taking 2 -- or in this case 19 -- photos that cover different parts of an area, stitching them together to make one big photo, and making a mistake with the positioning on one of the pieces.
You did read the actual article before rebutting to a comment that told you the summary was inaccurate, right?
Two issues:
The analysis concluded that it's not copied, and concluded that the moved crater can be explained by a mistake stitching the components together. If you look at that article, you'll note that the new image is missing a small crater in one place, and has an extra small crater a little ways away, and there's an odd indentation around it. She figured out where the seam probably was, shifted the parts a bit, and they line up perfectly.
That was the initial explanation for the "new" feature, though as Bad Astronomy pointed out, since it's on the near side of the moon, the impact probably would have been observed. However, the actual article (unlike the misleading summary) states that it can be explained by a botched job stitching together the components of the mosaic.
Have you considered reading the article?
In other words, yes, they fix bugs internally and publish them.
It's not a significant advantage, though. If you look at the most high-profile attacks over the last few years, a lot of them weren't developed by bad guys looking at source code or even by messing around with the program itself. They were developed after Microsoft released a patch, and the bad guys looked at it to see what the patch changed and reverse-engineer what was vulnerable about the previous version.
That tactic will work with any program, whether the source is available or not, and the hackers are quite willing to expend the effort. It seems like within days of any patch announcement, someone has come up with an exploit for it. So whether the source is open or closed, users of old versions are going to be more vulnerable after the fix is released than they were before.
As far as updating goes, many users seem just as bad at updating their closed-source software as they are at updating their open-source software (if they have any). Even when auto-update is available, as in Windows, Mac OS X, or Adobe Reader, many people leave it off or skip it.
I think /. just exhausted all the jokes back when they announced they were hiring her.
Firefox 0.9 only goes back to 2004. Even Mozilla 0.9 only goes back as far as 2001.
How much taxpayer money do you think NASA gets?
Depends on whether sales tax/VAT are included in the price. Here in the US (or at least in California), sales tax is rarely included in the advertised price. So a round $10.00 on a price tag or menu is still going to end up as a (for example) $10.78 transaction. Under those circumstances, setting the price at $9.99 doesn't make a difference in whether the clerk needs to make change or not.