aliens can't have had time required to find us yet.
So it would take 10 billion years to visit 4% of the Milky Way. In theory, if there are any aliens within the nearest 4% to us, they may have had time to visit us. Realistically, let's say the nearest 2%, to allow time for intelligent life to evolve and develop space travel. 2% of the galaxy is still a pretty big space, though you'd think we'd have seen some evidence of an alien civilization that (relatively) nearby.
The summary says that he's got Linux on a PowerMac. Neither Macromedia nor Adobe has ever released a version of Flash for Linux that runs on PowerPC, just 32-bit Intel.
...is to use two sets of authentication tokens, like this:
1. Connect via HTTPS 2. Log in. Sites sets tokens (with expiration times) in cookies and Flash data. 3. If cookies and Flash data disagree, assume the connection has been hijacked by another app on the PC and discontinue session. 4. Delete tokens on log-out.
I'm not sure if this would actually accomplish anything, and I'm not exactly thrilled about requiring a third-party plug-in, that it's the only thing I can think of that might actually be useful.
If they'd just gone through court procedures in the first place (it's not like it's difficult to get a FISA warrant), there wouldn't have been such a controversy in the first place.
Ironically, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that the administration's insistence last year that they didn't need judicial overview contributed to the electoral frustration that cost the Republicans control of Congress.
No, the awful "nearly all of IE7's growth has been upgrades from IE6" truism in the summary.
OK, I'll admit that was a bad way to phrase it, given that at a technical level, they're all upgrades. How about "nearly everyone using IE7 switched from IE6"? Would that be precise enough?
There are plenty of reasons for installing IE7, but none of them imply that you will also be actually using it.
"So much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?" -- Bill Gates, May 2005. Of course, he was talking about a certain other web browser...
Sending Expires and Cache-Control headers that say "Don't bother retrying for 3 years" might help mitigate some of the bandwidth waste.
That said, he's got a point that the feed readers should work if the DTD isn't retrievable -- but deliberately removing it looks like a great way to say "Netscape isn't reliable."
If you're looking at a snapshot, sure. If you're looking at trends, however, it's not the end of the story at all. In that case, still using TheCounter, you'll see that Firefox usage has climbed from 8% in October (the month before the releases of Firefox 2 and IE7) to 11% in January, and that total MSIE use has dropped from 87% to 84% in that same period of time.
Historically, people don't change their PC until they see a compelling reason. So far, no compelling reason to change has popped up over the horizon.
If everyone had relatively new WinXP machines, that would be an issue. But there are plenty of older machines that are reaching the end of their useful lives. People in that crowd would be looking into getting a new machine soon regardless of whether it came with XP or Vista. I'm sure there are still people buying their first computers, and families with shared computers still buy computers for their kids when they get old enough.
Most people who buy a new computer with Vista aren't going to be upgrading because it's Vista. They're going to be upgrading because this is when they're ready to get a new computer, and Vista's going to be the OS it comes with.
So basically this is such a useless revelation, that I can only hope that it was some attempt at manipulation.
Which, the 100 million downloads that the IE team reported? Or the fact that it hasn't shown any signs of slowing Firefox adoption? Because it doesn't take a genius to realize Microsoft was hoping IE7 would reverse or at least stem that tide.
Admittedly, this is a completely unscientific study based on one website, but I did some analysis on my own site's logs. Keep in mind that Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 have auto-update, and so far that auto-update has only been applied within a major revision. So 1.5 users have only been auto-updated to newer 1.5 releases so far.
Of all Firefox hits to my site, the three most popular versions are 2.0.0.1, 1.5.0.9, and 1.0.7. That's the latest in the 2.0 series, the latest in the 1.5 series... and the last in the 1.0 series before 1.5 came out. Virtually everyone on 1.5 or 2.0 has updated to the newest release in that series. Virtually no one updated to 1.0.8.
If this is any indication, when Mozilla puts the 1.5->2.0 update into the automatic channel, the vast majority of Firefox 1.5 users will convert over to 2.0.
Simply quoting download numbers is a completly bogus way of proving popularity.
Perhaps that's why the article is focused on the fact that the marketshare stats reflect a different reality than the download numbers:
According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer accounted for 79.6% of all browsers used in December 2006, a drop from the 80.6% during the previous month. Firefox's use, meanwhile, measured 14% in December, up from 13.5% in November. Also gaining ground in the last month of 2006 was Apple's Safari, which climbed to 4.2% from 4%, and Opera, which saw its share increase from 0.7% to 0.9%.
Net Applications' data put IE 7's market share during December at 18.3%, up dramatically from November's 8.8%. But IE 6 lost more than IE 7 gained, dropping from 70.9% in November to 60.7% the next month.
D'oh! First rule of ranting: check your sources. I wrote that based on the "equal and balanced" quote in the summary, then pasted in a quote from the actual article which said something slightly different.
"Honest" helps in both cases -- but "fair" requires an arbiter, and we already know what this government considers to be "fair."
Also in consideration is the "Fairness Doctrine," which required broadcasters to present controversial topics in a fair and honest manner.
Now every story on global warming will need to be 1/3 saying it's happening and humans are at least partly responsible, 1/3 saying it's happening and it's 100% natural, and 1/3 saying it's not happening at all, and things like arctic melting are just a hoax manufactured for leftist propaganda.
Meanwhile, any show on PBS or the Discovery Channel that deals with evolution in any way shape or form will have to cover not just the scientific consensus that natural selection has been at work for millions of years, but also Intelligent Design and young-Earth creationism. Similarly, anything about geology will have to include both the old-earth consensus and the idea that, for instance, the Grand Canyon was created during Noah's flood.
And let's not get started with making sure the Viet Cong's point of view is presented with equal weight to both the hawk and dove sides of the American point of view....
You'd think it would just stay in your stomach if your bladder was full and you were holding it but apparently it somehow goes somewhere else and kills you.
Water goes from your stomach to your intestines, and is absorbed into your bloodstream, and from there into other tissues. Only after it's in your system do the kidneys remove the excess and send it to your bladder. It's not as if there's a tube that leads straight from your stomach to your bladder.
While the recent Iraq War was certainly a voluntary war, many others have not been.
Thank you. While I personally have been opposed to the Iraq War from day one (well, before that, actually), I also get really annoyed at seeing glib statements like "War is not the answer" on bumper stickers. You know what, if a foreign power were carrying out a full-scale invasion of the US, war would be the answer.
While there are bona fide pacifists in the world (and I respect that position), it seems to me that there are a lot more people out there who cannot separate the concept of war from whatever current war we are fighting. I'm not certain if there is such a thing as a truly "just" war, but it's clear that some wars have better justification than others, and barring a genuine pacifist philosophy, they have to be evaluated differently.
Tried looking for it today in the Orange County, CA area. Despite the air being unusually clear (as it has been for the last few weeks), I just could not spot the comet. Chalk it up to being close to sea level and in the suburbs, I guess.
Oh, well, I was at least able to see it at sunset the last two nights.
I won't block/. ads unless they start doing something to get them in my way.
Agreed there. If an ad interferes with reading the site, or blares audio without asking me, I'll block it. I remember one site that had a pair of interesting articles (about website usability, ironically enough) that had so many ads it was almost impossible to read. I blocked all the ads, read the two articles, then never returned to the site.
With most of them, it's just as easy to tune them out.
Oddly, the only ads I can recall clicking on in the last year or so are on a handful of webcomics that I read. I wonder if that says something...
DRM is intrinsically time-limited. Eventually one of three things will happen:
The copyright on the content will expire.
Copyright law will change.
The authentication service will shut down.
A "perfect" DRM will have to adjust to changes in copyright status, which means it'll have to be able to do things like pick up the fact that a work has entered the public domain, or the copyright has been extended. That means it has to contact some authentication service. But we've seen from the DIVX fiasco that there are risks to relying on some outside service to authorize the use of your own equipment and media. DIVX discs are unplayable not because they've stopped making players. If you can find a working Betamax VCR, you can still play Beta tapes. DIVX discs are unplayable because the service that confirmed you had enough sessions left to play the disc, or charged you for playing it again, is gone.
Slashdot Mirror
So it would take 10 billion years to visit 4% of the Milky Way. In theory, if there are any aliens within the nearest 4% to us, they may have had time to visit us. Realistically, let's say the nearest 2%, to allow time for intelligent life to evolve and develop space travel. 2% of the galaxy is still a pretty big space, though you'd think we'd have seen some evidence of an alien civilization that (relatively) nearby.
It will if your Linux box runs on a PowerPC chip.
The summary says that he's got Linux on a PowerMac. Neither Macromedia nor Adobe has ever released a version of Flash for Linux that runs on PowerPC, just 32-bit Intel.
...is to use two sets of authentication tokens, like this:
1. Connect via HTTPS
2. Log in. Sites sets tokens (with expiration times) in cookies and Flash data.
3. If cookies and Flash data disagree, assume the connection has been hijacked by another app on the PC and discontinue session.
4. Delete tokens on log-out.
I'm not sure if this would actually accomplish anything, and I'm not exactly thrilled about requiring a third-party plug-in, that it's the only thing I can think of that might actually be useful.
Judging by the quote in the summary, it sounds like it's a way to work around cookies being disabled/deleted.
If they'd just gone through court procedures in the first place (it's not like it's difficult to get a FISA warrant), there wouldn't have been such a controversy in the first place.
Ironically, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that the administration's insistence last year that they didn't need judicial overview contributed to the electoral frustration that cost the Republicans control of Congress.
OK, I'll admit that was a bad way to phrase it, given that at a technical level, they're all upgrades. How about "nearly everyone using IE7 switched from IE6"? Would that be precise enough?
"So much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?" -- Bill Gates, May 2005. Of course, he was talking about a certain other web browser...
How is looking at the change from just before IE7 was released to 3 months after IE7 was released a "pre-IE7 trend"?
Sending Expires and Cache-Control headers that say "Don't bother retrying for 3 years" might help mitigate some of the bandwidth waste.
That said, he's got a point that the feed readers should work if the DTD isn't retrievable -- but deliberately removing it looks like a great way to say "Netscape isn't reliable."
If you're looking at a snapshot, sure. If you're looking at trends, however, it's not the end of the story at all. In that case, still using TheCounter, you'll see that Firefox usage has climbed from 8% in October (the month before the releases of Firefox 2 and IE7) to 11% in January, and that total MSIE use has dropped from 87% to 84% in that same period of time.
If everyone had relatively new WinXP machines, that would be an issue. But there are plenty of older machines that are reaching the end of their useful lives. People in that crowd would be looking into getting a new machine soon regardless of whether it came with XP or Vista. I'm sure there are still people buying their first computers, and families with shared computers still buy computers for their kids when they get old enough.
Most people who buy a new computer with Vista aren't going to be upgrading because it's Vista. They're going to be upgrading because this is when they're ready to get a new computer, and Vista's going to be the OS it comes with.
Which, the 100 million downloads that the IE team reported? Or the fact that it hasn't shown any signs of slowing Firefox adoption? Because it doesn't take a genius to realize Microsoft was hoping IE7 would reverse or at least stem that tide.
Admittedly, this is a completely unscientific study based on one website, but I did some analysis on my own site's logs. Keep in mind that Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 have auto-update, and so far that auto-update has only been applied within a major revision. So 1.5 users have only been auto-updated to newer 1.5 releases so far.
Of all Firefox hits to my site, the three most popular versions are 2.0.0.1, 1.5.0.9, and 1.0.7. That's the latest in the 2.0 series, the latest in the 1.5 series... and the last in the 1.0 series before 1.5 came out. Virtually everyone on 1.5 or 2.0 has updated to the newest release in that series. Virtually no one updated to 1.0.8.
If this is any indication, when Mozilla puts the 1.5->2.0 update into the automatic channel, the vast majority of Firefox 1.5 users will convert over to 2.0.
Perhaps that's why the article is focused on the fact that the marketshare stats reflect a different reality than the download numbers:
D'oh! First rule of ranting: check your sources. I wrote that based on the "equal and balanced" quote in the summary, then pasted in a quote from the actual article which said something slightly different.
"Honest" helps in both cases -- but "fair" requires an arbiter, and we already know what this government considers to be "fair."
Now every story on global warming will need to be 1/3 saying it's happening and humans are at least partly responsible, 1/3 saying it's happening and it's 100% natural, and 1/3 saying it's not happening at all, and things like arctic melting are just a hoax manufactured for leftist propaganda.
Meanwhile, any show on PBS or the Discovery Channel that deals with evolution in any way shape or form will have to cover not just the scientific consensus that natural selection has been at work for millions of years, but also Intelligent Design and young-Earth creationism. Similarly, anything about geology will have to include both the old-earth consensus and the idea that, for instance, the Grand Canyon was created during Noah's flood.
Let's see if we can find Velikovsky and von Daniken a place while we're at it.
And let's not get started with making sure the Viet Cong's point of view is presented with equal weight to both the hawk and dove sides of the American point of view....
Water goes from your stomach to your intestines, and is absorbed into your bloodstream, and from there into other tissues. Only after it's in your system do the kidneys remove the excess and send it to your bladder. It's not as if there's a tube that leads straight from your stomach to your bladder.
Appropriately, Slashdot hasn't gotten around to rejecting the (now-duplicate) version of this story I submitted last Thursday....
There we have it. Proof that, no matter how hard we try, we still haven't managed to create a crassless society.
Thank you. While I personally have been opposed to the Iraq War from day one (well, before that, actually), I also get really annoyed at seeing glib statements like "War is not the answer" on bumper stickers. You know what, if a foreign power were carrying out a full-scale invasion of the US, war would be the answer.
While there are bona fide pacifists in the world (and I respect that position), it seems to me that there are a lot more people out there who cannot separate the concept of war from whatever current war we are fighting. I'm not certain if there is such a thing as a truly "just" war, but it's clear that some wars have better justification than others, and barring a genuine pacifist philosophy, they have to be evaluated differently.
Tried looking for it today in the Orange County, CA area. Despite the air being unusually clear (as it has been for the last few weeks), I just could not spot the comet. Chalk it up to being close to sea level and in the suburbs, I guess.
Oh, well, I was at least able to see it at sunset the last two nights.
Agreed there. If an ad interferes with reading the site, or blares audio without asking me, I'll block it. I remember one site that had a pair of interesting articles (about website usability, ironically enough) that had so many ads it was almost impossible to read. I blocked all the ads, read the two articles, then never returned to the site.
With most of them, it's just as easy to tune them out.
Oddly, the only ads I can recall clicking on in the last year or so are on a handful of webcomics that I read. I wonder if that says something...
DRM is intrinsically time-limited. Eventually one of three things will happen:
A "perfect" DRM will have to adjust to changes in copyright status, which means it'll have to be able to do things like pick up the fact that a work has entered the public domain, or the copyright has been extended. That means it has to contact some authentication service. But we've seen from the DIVX fiasco that there are risks to relying on some outside service to authorize the use of your own equipment and media. DIVX discs are unplayable not because they've stopped making players. If you can find a working Betamax VCR, you can still play Beta tapes. DIVX discs are unplayable because the service that confirmed you had enough sessions left to play the disc, or charged you for playing it again, is gone.
Wait, Opera has ducks? Or is that just a fowl accusation?