It's also worth noting that native form controls for Mac OS X were enabled yesterday, something Firefox's Mac users have been clamoring for since the 0.x days.
If the software changes in ways I don't like, I'll switch to another alternative. Nobody's forcing anyone to stick with what they're using now, tomorrow. What ever gave you that idea? We have a certain ammount of power as consumers in the choices we make.
That works for some types of software, like a web browser. HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. are all well-defined standards, and as long as you can transfer your bookmarks, you're set. Sure, it's nice to be able to transfer your cookies and other settings as well, but the biggest effort involved in switching web browsers is in getting used to the the new application.
Sometimes, though, it's not that easy.
I used to write a lot of documents in WordPerfect. I brought it along from DOS to Windows and then to Linux. Then Corel (or whoever owned WordPerfect at the time) canceled the Linux version of WordPerfect. Over time, the libraries it required stopped getting shipped with Linux distributions, and it was no longer possible to run the old WordPerfect app without spending a lot of effort to track down those old libraries. So I was left with a bunch of documents in WordPerfect format, and no WordPerfect.
I eventually sat down and took a lot of time going through all the documents I wanted to keep. Stories and poetry I'd written. The occasional essay or newsletter article. I pulled them up on a Windows box that had WordPerfect installed, so that I wouldn't have to worry about other word processors' import filters. (IIRC, OpenOffice had problems importing WordPerfect at the time.) I then classified each document based on whether formatting was important. If it was, I saved it as RTF text. If not, I saved it as plain text.
Now I can bring up my archive of old stuff in any word processor, whether open or closed, because the data formats are open.
So now, switching from one word processor to another is trivial. But when all my data was in a format designed for a discontinued application, it was a major event.
I agree -- halfway. Had early web browsers been strict about errors, we wouldn't have so much broken code out there, and cross-browser compatibility would be solely a matter of which features are supported -- not which set of error-correcting assumptions you expect.
On the other hand, the fact that those early versions of Mosaic, Netscape, IE, etc. would do something with broken code instead of refusing to display it meant that the barriers to entry were a lot lower. It vastly increased the pool of people who could create web pages, and the talent pool. Sure, some people have both artistic talent and programming ability, or have the resources to team up. But can you imagine a web built solely by programmers?
Eventually the authoring tools would have caught up. But I have to wonder if the web would be as big and diverse as it is now if it hadn't been able to pull in the casual author back in 1995.
Yes, we have crappily-coded sites like MySpace. On the other hand, 10 years ago the idea of visiting a website was inordinately dorky, and being online meant you were a social outcast. Now, it seems like being offline is considered freakish.
Wait, are you saying that the client-side JavaFX components are already in the JRE -- and an old one at that -- and don't need anything new to be installed?
The "balanced" in a "balanced diet" means that you've balanced all factors appropriately so that you're getting the nutrition you need. Not that you'll end up with the same weight if you separate out each component.
What you posted isn't a logical analysis of the issue, it's taking a pun -- and an old one at that -- to an extreme.
Just for kicks I checked my bank and a couple of other banks/credit cards that I thought of off the top of my head.
I went to the home pages for: Bank of America Bank of the West Washington Mutual Union Bank of California Citibank Discover Card American Express
All of them except for Citibank had login forms on the home page. Three -- Bank of America, American Express, and Union Bank of California -- had redirected me to the HTTPS version of the site on loading that page.
That left: Bank of the West with a two-stage login (presumably the password stage is on an HTTPS server?). Citibank, where the "Sign in" link takes you to a secure login page, but the "sign into your account" drop-down takes you to an unsecured login page, and two -- Washington Mutual and Discover -- that had full login forms on the unsecured home pages.
Similarly, I have a real hard time swallowing the idea that a high fat diet is a good thing.
Whatever happened to the concept of a balanced diet? Why is it always about eliminating one type of nutrient or another?
Declaring "carbs are the enemy" or "fat is the enemy" doesn't solve anything except for people who are already eating too much carbs, or too much fat. People go haywire, eating too much of the "safe" foods, or eliminate more of the "unsafe" foods than they should and end up with a nutritional deficiency, or can't stick with the new eating habits and gain back the weight.
Is it that outlandish to consider a diet that includes both carbohydrates and fats, but not too much of either?
False information? It looks like all the information on DHMO.org is true.
Arrgh! Here's a conundrum: I can't mod you up because I already posted in this thread. But your comment was a response to mine. So if I hadn't posted in this thread, you wouldn't have made this comment. This means that no matter what course of action I might have taken in this thread, there is no possible way I would ever have been able to mod your comment up!
Sorry, I meant to say that you couldn't just download an alternative JRE for Mac OS X. My point was that you get Apple's version with your operating system, and you can upgrade to a newer version from Apple, but you can't get one from Sun or (AFAIK) anywhere else.
That means you have to wait for Apple to incorporate the library into their JRE and push it out to users. And here's the key: Apple's Java always seems to lag behind the upstream version. They're still on Java 5. Java 6 has been out for, what, 4 months? From what I can tell, they're even several point releases behind on Java 5. The most recent release I could find was 1.5.0_07 Sun's version of Java 5 is up to 1.5.0_11.
So yes, waiting for it to appear in Apple's JRE is a concern.
Hmm, "prohibitions on the spread of false information...."
Does that mean that if another city starts considering legislation to ban dihydrogen monoxide (like Aliso Viejo, California did in 2004), that the government could seek damages from the mainainers of DHMO.org?
Bad phrasing on the part of the submitter and/or editors: according to the article, JavaFX isn't a "combination Applet, Flash, Javascript, and AJAX" in the technological sense, but in the sense of the kinds of features it provides. It's actually an extension to Java.
Anyway, there is one drawback it's going to have as compared to AJAX: It will require end-users to install something. As it is now, AJAX will run (to some extent) in MSIE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and a number of browsers with similar rendering engines. Even if it gets built in to the standard JRE, that still requires people to install Java, putting it more on par with Flash (though at this point a lot of people do have Java installed).
So, how long before Sun convinces Apple to include JavaFX in their version of the JRE? Last I looked you couldn't just download a JRE for MacOS X.
Generally the session itself *is* secured by SSL/TLS. The problem is that many banks have dropped that protection from the login page, meaning that a password thief can then get into your account.
Maybe, but putting the login page on an HTTPS site that you already have isn't a terribly expensive proposition -- especially when you consider that many of these banks used to do it that way. Someone made an effort to move the login form onto the HTTP site, change all the links, etc., which probably cost more than leaving it on the HTTPS site would have cost.
When I saw this story, I skimmed the first line, then got to the second, which read: "Hans Reiser has confessed to killing eight people unrelated to the case." It was a bit of a jolt. Then I went back and realized that it was referring to his wife's ex-lover, not to Reiser himself.
This is why you don't put a giant 10-word prepositional phrase between a subject and verb, especially if that phrase ends with something that could plausibly by a subject.
Pollution is another matter. I've never been to a traditionally smoggy city in the US (say, Houston or LA) but Guangzhou had a blanket of smog a couple hundred feet above the surface at all times... I can actually remember the air being "heavy." It was a releif to get out to countryside, so we could see the sun again.
Even Los Angeles is much better than it used to be. Average visibility in the LA/Orange County area seems much better now than it did in the early 1990s, and my dad has stories of horrendous smog conditions in the 1960s that I have only ever seen when the region is blanketed by smoke from nearby wildfires.
The best solution is probably to use stable couples for really long missions (months to years), but that makes it harder to recruit the best. Even then if things do go wrong you have a horrible mess.
That also assumes that the couples remain stable under the stress of isolation. If relationships start rearranging, you're back to square one. Possibly worse because it's not just rejection, but infidelity, which would bring a whole new set of baggage.
There's a Harry Turtledove novel, A World of Difference which postulates a larger, more Earth-like planet where Mars is, and has competing US and Soviet missions. The US mission sends three couples. The Soviet mission just picks 6 people and ends up with 5 men and a woman. The Soviet crew has its problems with the men competing over the woman, but the US crew has problems too. One couple becomes desperate for privacy, which causes severe strain on their relationship. Another breaks down completely, and the husband starts pursuing the other women.
Theres a hundred ways an account can get an email (spam or not) without it being mined specifically by the future defendant.
The way Project Honeypot works is this:
A webmaster puts a script somewhere on his site.
The webmaster then puts hidden links to that script such that most human visitors will not notice them.
Bots crawl the site, and access the script.
The script contacts Project Honeypot, which generates a unique email address (or several) and a legal statement explaining that you do not have permission to use the email address. Date, time, and IP address are logged along with the email address generated.
Legit bots, like search engine spiders, won't do anything with the addresses picked up from the script. But address harvesters will eventually hand the address to a spammer.
If spam is received at the email address, Project Honeypot knows:
The spammer picked up the address from a harvester, either directly or indirectly.
The IP from which the harvester connected, and when.
On a side note the Geneva conventions are "quaint" and "obsolete," particularly when applied to warfare with cultures that don't recognize said conventions.
By the same token, why should we expect them to recognize those conventions, if they know we aren't going to?
Sure, you can say that "they started it" -- but what good does it do anyone for us to escalate the problem?
Nobody goes to the opera for the plot or storyline. They go for amazing music and extremely talented vocalists. If you can't supply that, the best story in world won't save you.
And that's where opera and the Broadway-style musical differ. Opera is about presenting music through a story. Musicals are about presenting a story through music.
If you go to an opera, you're going to see lavish sets and hear people with incredible singing voices. But don't count on understanding every word, because opera singers are trained to treat their voice primarily as an instrument. The story is there in service to the music.
In a musical, however, the music is in service to the story. The actors are trained to sing, but the priority is to convey what the character is thinking, feeling, and doing. In a musical, if you can't understand what the lead actor is singing, something's wrong.
I studied musical theater in college. In one production, one of our leads was a music major rather than a theater major. It was really hard for her to get used to singing in a musical theater style. She said it felt like she was being told to sing badly, because all her training emphasized the sound over the meaning.
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It's also worth noting that native form controls for Mac OS X were enabled yesterday, something Firefox's Mac users have been clamoring for since the 0.x days.
That works for some types of software, like a web browser. HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. are all well-defined standards, and as long as you can transfer your bookmarks, you're set. Sure, it's nice to be able to transfer your cookies and other settings as well, but the biggest effort involved in switching web browsers is in getting used to the the new application.
Sometimes, though, it's not that easy.
I used to write a lot of documents in WordPerfect. I brought it along from DOS to Windows and then to Linux. Then Corel (or whoever owned WordPerfect at the time) canceled the Linux version of WordPerfect. Over time, the libraries it required stopped getting shipped with Linux distributions, and it was no longer possible to run the old WordPerfect app without spending a lot of effort to track down those old libraries. So I was left with a bunch of documents in WordPerfect format, and no WordPerfect.
I eventually sat down and took a lot of time going through all the documents I wanted to keep. Stories and poetry I'd written. The occasional essay or newsletter article. I pulled them up on a Windows box that had WordPerfect installed, so that I wouldn't have to worry about other word processors' import filters. (IIRC, OpenOffice had problems importing WordPerfect at the time.) I then classified each document based on whether formatting was important. If it was, I saved it as RTF text. If not, I saved it as plain text.
Now I can bring up my archive of old stuff in any word processor, whether open or closed, because the data formats are open.
So now, switching from one word processor to another is trivial. But when all my data was in a format designed for a discontinued application, it was a major event.
I agree -- halfway. Had early web browsers been strict about errors, we wouldn't have so much broken code out there, and cross-browser compatibility would be solely a matter of which features are supported -- not which set of error-correcting assumptions you expect.
On the other hand, the fact that those early versions of Mosaic, Netscape, IE, etc. would do something with broken code instead of refusing to display it meant that the barriers to entry were a lot lower. It vastly increased the pool of people who could create web pages, and the talent pool. Sure, some people have both artistic talent and programming ability, or have the resources to team up. But can you imagine a web built solely by programmers?
Eventually the authoring tools would have caught up. But I have to wonder if the web would be as big and diverse as it is now if it hadn't been able to pull in the casual author back in 1995.
Yes, we have crappily-coded sites like MySpace. On the other hand, 10 years ago the idea of visiting a website was inordinately dorky, and being online meant you were a social outcast. Now, it seems like being offline is considered freakish.
Don't worry, you can protect yourself from it using the Brooke Shield.
Wait, are you saying that the client-side JavaFX components are already in the JRE -- and an old one at that -- and don't need anything new to be installed?
The "balanced" in a "balanced diet" means that you've balanced all factors appropriately so that you're getting the nutrition you need. Not that you'll end up with the same weight if you separate out each component.
What you posted isn't a logical analysis of the issue, it's taking a pun -- and an old one at that -- to an extreme.
Just for kicks I checked my bank and a couple of other banks/credit cards that I thought of off the top of my head.
I went to the home pages for:
Bank of America
Bank of the West
Washington Mutual
Union Bank of California
Citibank
Discover Card
American Express
All of them except for Citibank had login forms on the home page. Three -- Bank of America, American Express, and Union Bank of California -- had redirected me to the HTTPS version of the site on loading that page.
That left: Bank of the West with a two-stage login (presumably the password stage is on an HTTPS server?). Citibank, where the "Sign in" link takes you to a secure login page, but the "sign into your account" drop-down takes you to an unsecured login page, and two -- Washington Mutual and Discover -- that had full login forms on the unsecured home pages.
Similarly, I have a real hard time swallowing the idea that a high fat diet is a good thing.
Whatever happened to the concept of a balanced diet? Why is it always about eliminating one type of nutrient or another?
Declaring "carbs are the enemy" or "fat is the enemy" doesn't solve anything except for people who are already eating too much carbs, or too much fat. People go haywire, eating too much of the "safe" foods, or eliminate more of the "unsafe" foods than they should and end up with a nutritional deficiency, or can't stick with the new eating habits and gain back the weight.
Is it that outlandish to consider a diet that includes both carbohydrates and fats, but not too much of either?
Arrgh! Here's a conundrum: I can't mod you up because I already posted in this thread. But your comment was a response to mine. So if I hadn't posted in this thread, you wouldn't have made this comment. This means that no matter what course of action I might have taken in this thread, there is no possible way I would ever have been able to mod your comment up!
Sorry, I meant to say that you couldn't just download an alternative JRE for Mac OS X. My point was that you get Apple's version with your operating system, and you can upgrade to a newer version from Apple, but you can't get one from Sun or (AFAIK) anywhere else.
That means you have to wait for Apple to incorporate the library into their JRE and push it out to users. And here's the key: Apple's Java always seems to lag behind the upstream version. They're still on Java 5. Java 6 has been out for, what, 4 months? From what I can tell, they're even several point releases behind on Java 5. The most recent release I could find was 1.5.0_07 Sun's version of Java 5 is up to 1.5.0_11.
So yes, waiting for it to appear in Apple's JRE is a concern.
Hmm, "prohibitions on the spread of false information...."
Does that mean that if another city starts considering legislation to ban dihydrogen monoxide (like Aliso Viejo, California did in 2004), that the government could seek damages from the mainainers of DHMO.org?
Bad phrasing on the part of the submitter and/or editors: according to the article, JavaFX isn't a "combination Applet, Flash, Javascript, and AJAX" in the technological sense, but in the sense of the kinds of features it provides. It's actually an extension to Java.
Anyway, there is one drawback it's going to have as compared to AJAX: It will require end-users to install something. As it is now, AJAX will run (to some extent) in MSIE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and a number of browsers with similar rendering engines. Even if it gets built in to the standard JRE, that still requires people to install Java, putting it more on par with Flash (though at this point a lot of people do have Java installed).
So, how long before Sun convinces Apple to include JavaFX in their version of the JRE? Last I looked you couldn't just download a JRE for MacOS X.
Generally the session itself *is* secured by SSL/TLS. The problem is that many banks have dropped that protection from the login page, meaning that a password thief can then get into your account.
Maybe, but putting the login page on an HTTPS site that you already have isn't a terribly expensive proposition -- especially when you consider that many of these banks used to do it that way. Someone made an effort to move the login form onto the HTTP site, change all the links, etc., which probably cost more than leaving it on the HTTPS site would have cost.
When I saw this story, I skimmed the first line, then got to the second, which read: "Hans Reiser has confessed to killing eight people unrelated to the case." It was a bit of a jolt. Then I went back and realized that it was referring to his wife's ex-lover, not to Reiser himself.
This is why you don't put a giant 10-word prepositional phrase between a subject and verb, especially if that phrase ends with something that could plausibly by a subject.
Only if he did all the animation and voices himself.
Even Los Angeles is much better than it used to be. Average visibility in the LA/Orange County area seems much better now than it did in the early 1990s, and my dad has stories of horrendous smog conditions in the 1960s that I have only ever seen when the region is blanketed by smoke from nearby wildfires.
That also assumes that the couples remain stable under the stress of isolation. If relationships start rearranging, you're back to square one. Possibly worse because it's not just rejection, but infidelity, which would bring a whole new set of baggage.
There's a Harry Turtledove novel, A World of Difference which postulates a larger, more Earth-like planet where Mars is, and has competing US and Soviet missions. The US mission sends three couples. The Soviet mission just picks 6 people and ends up with 5 men and a woman. The Soviet crew has its problems with the men competing over the woman, but the US crew has problems too. One couple becomes desperate for privacy, which causes severe strain on their relationship. Another breaks down completely, and the husband starts pursuing the other women.
The way Project Honeypot works is this:
By the same token, why should we expect them to recognize those conventions, if they know we aren't going to?
Sure, you can say that "they started it" -- but what good does it do anyone for us to escalate the problem?
I remember someone characterizing Carter, with his long diplomatic career, as a much better ex-President than President.
I take it you've never opened a preferences panel for any of your applications?
If Microsoft couldn't squash the problem in a business-friendly government, Apple isn't going to have any better luck.
And that's exactly why I didn't like Cats when I saw it. (Long before I actually studied any of this stuff.) It wasn't a musical, it was a dance show.
And that's where opera and the Broadway-style musical differ. Opera is about presenting music through a story. Musicals are about presenting a story through music.
If you go to an opera, you're going to see lavish sets and hear people with incredible singing voices. But don't count on understanding every word, because opera singers are trained to treat their voice primarily as an instrument. The story is there in service to the music.
In a musical, however, the music is in service to the story. The actors are trained to sing, but the priority is to convey what the character is thinking, feeling, and doing. In a musical, if you can't understand what the lead actor is singing, something's wrong.
I studied musical theater in college. In one production, one of our leads was a music major rather than a theater major. It was really hard for her to get used to singing in a musical theater style. She said it felt like she was being told to sing badly, because all her training emphasized the sound over the meaning.