The statistics may have changed, but I remember one of those trick/trivia questions from when I was younger (in the 1980s): What's the most common name in the world?
It turned out it was, if you include all the variations, Mohammed. Throw in Mahmet, Makhmoud, Mahmoud, and various other spellings and transliterations.
Somehow, I doubt a large enough percentage of them are liekly to be terrorists for the name to be worth checking.
They have not, given years to work on it, brought their browser up to a normal level of compliance with Web standards.
I can hardly argue with that*, but it isn't what you claimed before, which was not simply that IE7 was inadequate in an absolute sense, but that it showed no relative improvement over IE6. I believe the technical term here is "moving the goalposts."
*Well, I might dispute the "given years to work on it" part, since it's pretty clear that Microsoft didn't want anyone working on anything except security fixes for IE until last year -- but that depends on whether you're talking about Microsoft as a whole (who has had 5 years) or their IE development team (who have had maybe 1.5).
Golly looks just the same as IE6.... They can talk all they want, but they still haven't managed to do anything.
So you're saying they haven't added support for alpha transparency on PNG images? That they haven't added fixed positioning or additional CSS selectors? That they haven't fixed any of the specific bugs they mentioned?
Just because they didn't fix the bugs that affect you doesn't mean they did nothing at all.
I always figured someone messed up on NGE and added an extra letter to the first word. Heck, maybe it was a typo. "Neo Genesis Evangelion," or maybe "Neo Genesis: Evangelion" would at least make sense, especially once you've seen enough of the show to figure out what's really going on.
Though as I keep altering that title, it starts looking more and more like a Jack Kirby comic book.
There should be no web browser that's integrated into the OS.
I think you're using different meanings for "integrated." You mean firmly entrenched with tendrils running throughout the system. I suspect the GP post meant pre-installed (i.e. integrated in the installer and/or the user experience).
There are a number of reasons that some web browser should be pre-installed with a new computer or OS install. The foremost is this: A whole lot of software -- browsers included -- is distributed online these days. A built-in browser of some sort is necessary just to get your browser of choice. Care to guess how many Slashdotters have used IE primarily to download Firefox?
You could, of course, get by with a minimal browser like Off By One (and we're back to the WordPad vs. Word analogy), as long as it has the ability to fill out forms and download files.
The alternative is to rely on CD-ROM distribution just to get online. (And don't suggest command-line FTP as the way to let people download Firefox/IE/Opera/what-the-hell-ever. You can figure it out, I can figure it out, but most people don't want to mess around with the command-line when there's a simpler way to do it.)
Changes to IE7's rendering engine have been primarily in fixing bugs and catching up to established standards like CSS. came out of WhatWG (or, more precisely, came out of work Apple was doing to make Dashboard widgets possible, then submitted to WhatWG), which, so far, the IE team appears to be ignoring.
Since WhatWG's work does seem to be catching on, with Opera, Firefox and Safari all implementing features and not just talking about it, there might be some pressure on Microsoft to start adding support in IE 7.5 or IE 8.
I'm pretty sure Opera 9 does. It passes the ACID2 test.
Repeat after me: Acid2 is not a rigorous CSS compliance test. Passing Acid2 does not mean you support every aspect of some version of CSS. It was designed to catch a number of aspects that most browsers did not support as of a year ago.
I'll agree that Opera 9 supports more of CSS2.1 than Firefox 1.5, but I believe it also supports more of CSS 2.1 than Safari 2, which also passes Acid2.
As for "Where's Netscape?" -- present-day Netscape is a fusion of IE and Firefox. It uses the IE's Trident engine on some pages and Mozilla's Gecko engine on others. Previous versions of Netscape that have enough CSS support to consider were also Gecko-based.
I haven't seen any big differences between beta 2 and beta 3 (though of course there was a huge jump between IE6 and IE7 beta 2), but they did at least fix one obscure bug I'd reported back in March.
Under very specific circumstances, hovering over a link in IE7b2 could cause floated objects further up the page to disappear. Ironically, I discovered the bug on a page using a floated Get Firefox button. Yes, you read that right: a bug in IE caused a Firefox link to disappear.
It doesn't help that MySpace's structure actually encourages people to lie about their age. All profiles claiming to be under a certain age are private, and can only be read by friends. All profiles claiming to be above that age are public, and can't be hidden.
So if you're 14(?), and want people to find your profile, you lie and say you're older.
And if you're an adult, and you only want friends to be able to see your profile, you lie and say you're younger.
This could be easily solved by simply making public/private a separate option, independent of the user's claimed age.
That's some serious camouflage. I mean, think about it: given the typical MySpace user, who would think to look!
Though you might be able to classify some of the website layouts you find on MySpace as terrorist weapons themselves, capable of crashing thousands of browsers worldwide.
Actually, when I read the headline, my first thought was "Writers Guild of America." Until I started on the summary, I thought maybe it was talking about an upcoming writer's strike or something.
You know, in the world outside, there are people (gasp!) who even speak more than one language (doublegasp!) and can translate that thing.
Really? No lo creo!
(P.S. Note to Slashdot. That inverted exclamation mark you're stripping from the previous paragraph is a valid character, even in ISO-8859-1.)
Re:All security features are targets for attack
on
Dealing with Phishing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Do they let you upload your own picture, or do you select from a list of what they provide?
Unfortunately, it's the latter. Though they do have several hundred images to choose from.
Plus there's another layer before phishers can retrieve your image based on your login name. If the site doesn't recognize your browser (via a cookie or set of cookies) it will ask a challenge/response question first, *then* it'll show you your chosen image and manually-entered caption. By default it will forget the browser, so if you trust a friend's computer or *shudder* an internet cafe with access to your banking site, you can use it once without it setting that cookie, or you can click a checkbox to have it recognize your browser next time and start with the image+phrase.
Once all that's done, *then* it asks for your password.
No, global warming, or an asteroid impact, or a nuclear war, or runaway deforestation or strip mining or anything else of the type won't destroy the world.
The Earth is built to last.... It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily.
This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity.... Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.
I don't know about you, but I think the solution to screwing up the environment by altering a chaotic system in ways we don't quite understand is not to alter it further, hoping we understood correctly, but to stop (or rather to slow down) altering it.
Otherwise, we're falling into the same trap we have over and over again where the environment gets knocked out of whack -- such as the accidental introduction of a new species which proceeds to take over -- and we try to take a two-by-four and whack it in the other direction -- say, by introducing a predator to control that species -- and every time we're surprised when instead of correcting the course, it goes off careening in another direction -- the introduced predator ignores the target species and overruns the ecosystem itself.
Take the ozone hole, for instance. We thought CFCs were these wonderful inert compounds that we could use safely. A few decades later, we find out that the one thing they do interact with -- ozone under high-UV conditions -- is extremely important to our continued health. The solution was not to launch some new UV shielding particle into the upper atmosphere -- god knows what side effects that would have had -- but to stop using CFCs, switch to something else, and let things sort themselves out.
Until we know a hell of a lot more than we do about climatology, we're better off minimizing our interference than trying to counteract it.
a scenario such as a student athlete posting photos of themself wearing a Kent State athletics uniform and holding a Nazi flag
Yep, totally out of line... and could still be done on MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, Geocities, or a personal website. Or sent to friends by email or instant messenger. Or sent directly from cell phone to cell phone. Or printed and photocopied. It still has the potential to get out. Should the university ban student athletes from owning camera phones, because they could use them to make the university look bad? How about using email or IM? Or, to make a more accurate comparison, should the university ban them just from using Motorola camera phones?
I'm a huge supporter of free speech but I don't think it gives people the right to be irresponsible and immature simply because they're students, athletes, or both.
1. Where'd this "right to be irresponsible" come from? That's a total non-sequitur. 2. You support free speech, but you'd prefer a blanket ban over making people act responsibly in the first place?
One one hand, this policy is overkill. If you're going to block athletes from social networking sites because they might post something that makes the university look bad, you might as well keep them out of classes because they might cheat and make the university look bad.
On the other hand, it's likely to be astonishingly ineffective, because there are so many other places that athletes could go to act badly without running afoul of the ban.
It's like trying to make your city look good not by cleaning up the streets, but by hiding the crime statistics -- except you're not even hiding the crime statistics, you're keeping them out of one of five local newspapers.
Instead the point is to get the product at a CHEAPER price than standard
Unless you're looking for something that's no longer available through "standard" channels. In this case it's not just a matter of picking your auctions carefully, it's a matter of spreading things out over time.
Unless you want something very specific, or you're in a hurry, you don't have to rely on winning one auction. It's more like fishing with multiple poles. You cast out several lines over a certain period of time, and figure maybe 1 in 4 will actually catch anything. Who cares if line #1 doesn't get any fish, or even #2, if you get one on #3?
As an example: over the last few months, I've started picking up a series of comic books from the 1940s. You can't just go to a store and buy them, because only a small percentage of comic stores even carry books that old. Your best bets are to visit collectibles fairs, comic-book conventions, and online stores -- and even those tend to focus on the rare or higher-quality books that cost in the $100-$10,000 range. Ebay, on the other hand, has a steady stream of stores, individual collectors, and people who find old comics in their attics, selling everything from the ultra-rare first appearance of whoever to the torn, soda-stained but still readable random issue of series X. So for the most part, I just bid my max on any auction that fits the criteria, and figure I'll only win a fraction of them. So far it's worked out pretty well.
Yeah, but wouldn't it make more sense for them to tell their student athletes not to post incriminating information than to simply ban them from using a communication forum? Or better yet, rely on such information to enforce the code of conduct, instead of trying to sweep violations under the rug?
I mean, what you seem to be saying is that the Duke Lacrosse incident would have been OK, as long as no one found out about it.
It's one thing to say, "don't post pictures of yourself violating the code of conduct." It's another to say, "don't post pictures of yourself at all," or "don't post anything on site X" -- when sites W, Y and Z are just as accessible.
Slashdot Mirror
Yu shud bi shur tu rid this artikel on speling riform. It wil mayk yu laf, i hop.
The statistics may have changed, but I remember one of those trick/trivia questions from when I was younger (in the 1980s): What's the most common name in the world?
It turned out it was, if you include all the variations, Mohammed. Throw in Mahmet, Makhmoud, Mahmoud, and various other spellings and transliterations.
Somehow, I doubt a large enough percentage of them are liekly to be terrorists for the name to be worth checking.
I can hardly argue with that*, but it isn't what you claimed before, which was not simply that IE7 was inadequate in an absolute sense, but that it showed no relative improvement over IE6. I believe the technical term here is "moving the goalposts."
*Well, I might dispute the "given years to work on it" part, since it's pretty clear that Microsoft didn't want anyone working on anything except security fixes for IE until last year -- but that depends on whether you're talking about Microsoft as a whole (who has had 5 years) or their IE development team (who have had maybe 1.5).
So you're saying they haven't added support for alpha transparency on PNG images? That they haven't added fixed positioning or additional CSS selectors? That they haven't fixed any of the specific bugs they mentioned?
Just because they didn't fix the bugs that affect you doesn't mean they did nothing at all.
I always figured someone messed up on NGE and added an extra letter to the first word. Heck, maybe it was a typo. "Neo Genesis Evangelion," or maybe "Neo Genesis: Evangelion" would at least make sense, especially once you've seen enough of the show to figure out what's really going on.
Though as I keep altering that title, it starts looking more and more like a Jack Kirby comic book.
I think you're using different meanings for "integrated." You mean firmly entrenched with tendrils running throughout the system. I suspect the GP post meant pre-installed (i.e. integrated in the installer and/or the user experience).
There are a number of reasons that some web browser should be pre-installed with a new computer or OS install. The foremost is this: A whole lot of software -- browsers included -- is distributed online these days. A built-in browser of some sort is necessary just to get your browser of choice. Care to guess how many Slashdotters have used IE primarily to download Firefox?
You could, of course, get by with a minimal browser like Off By One (and we're back to the WordPad vs. Word analogy), as long as it has the ability to fill out forms and download files.
The alternative is to rely on CD-ROM distribution just to get online. (And don't suggest command-line FTP as the way to let people download Firefox/IE/Opera/what-the-hell-ever. You can figure it out, I can figure it out, but most people don't want to mess around with the command-line when there's a simpler way to do it.)
Changes to IE7's rendering engine have been primarily in fixing bugs and catching up to established standards like CSS. came out of WhatWG (or, more precisely, came out of work Apple was doing to make Dashboard widgets possible, then submitted to WhatWG), which, so far, the IE team appears to be ignoring.
Since WhatWG's work does seem to be catching on, with Opera, Firefox and Safari all implementing features and not just talking about it, there might be some pressure on Microsoft to start adding support in IE 7.5 or IE 8.
Here's another comparison chart that includes Safari (KHTML) and Opera 9 (Presto).
Repeat after me: Acid2 is not a rigorous CSS compliance test. Passing Acid2 does not mean you support every aspect of some version of CSS. It was designed to catch a number of aspects that most browsers did not support as of a year ago.
I'll agree that Opera 9 supports more of CSS2.1 than Firefox 1.5, but I believe it also supports more of CSS 2.1 than Safari 2, which also passes Acid2.
As for "Where's Netscape?" -- present-day Netscape is a fusion of IE and Firefox. It uses the IE's Trident engine on some pages and Mozilla's Gecko engine on others. Previous versions of Netscape that have enough CSS support to consider were also Gecko-based.
Other way around: IE7 interferes with Flight Simulator.
As a guess, Flight Simulator probably includes a help reader or other page reader that uses the IE engine internally.
I haven't seen any big differences between beta 2 and beta 3 (though of course there was a huge jump between IE6 and IE7 beta 2), but they did at least fix one obscure bug I'd reported back in March.
Under very specific circumstances, hovering over a link in IE7b2 could cause floated objects further up the page to disappear. Ironically, I discovered the bug on a page using a floated Get Firefox button. Yes, you read that right: a bug in IE caused a Firefox link to disappear.
You are aware that IE7 has had tabbed browsing since beta 1 came out last year, right?
Of course, no one else implements all of CSS2 either. Though everyone else seems to be pretty far ahead of MSIE in that respect.
Lake Titicaca! Lake Titicaca!
Why do we sing of its fame?
Lake Titicaca! Lake Titicaca!
'Cause we really like saying its name!
It doesn't help that MySpace's structure actually encourages people to lie about their age. All profiles claiming to be under a certain age are private, and can only be read by friends. All profiles claiming to be above that age are public, and can't be hidden.
So if you're 14(?), and want people to find your profile, you lie and say you're older.
And if you're an adult, and you only want friends to be able to see your profile, you lie and say you're younger.
This could be easily solved by simply making public/private a separate option, independent of the user's claimed age.
That's some serious camouflage. I mean, think about it: given the typical MySpace user, who would think to look!
Though you might be able to classify some of the website layouts you find on MySpace as terrorist weapons themselves, capable of crashing thousands of browsers worldwide.
Actually, when I read the headline, my first thought was "Writers Guild of America." Until I started on the summary, I thought maybe it was talking about an upcoming writer's strike or something.
Really? No lo creo!
(P.S. Note to Slashdot. That inverted exclamation mark you're stripping from the previous paragraph is a valid character, even in ISO-8859-1.)
Do they let you upload your own picture, or do you select from a list of what they provide?
Unfortunately, it's the latter. Though they do have several hundred images to choose from.
Plus there's another layer before phishers can retrieve your image based on your login name. If the site doesn't recognize your browser (via a cookie or set of cookies) it will ask a challenge/response question first, *then* it'll show you your chosen image and manually-entered caption. By default it will forget the browser, so if you trust a friend's computer or *shudder* an internet cafe with access to your banking site, you can use it once without it setting that cookie, or you can click a checkbox to have it recognize your browser next time and start with the image+phrase.
Once all that's done, *then* it asks for your password.
I trust you've seen the guide on How to destroy the Earth?
where nothing is constant and sweeping gerealizations are stupid.
Well, the sweeping generalizations are usually stupid, but that does change from time to time...
I don't know about you, but I think the solution to screwing up the environment by altering a chaotic system in ways we don't quite understand is not to alter it further, hoping we understood correctly, but to stop (or rather to slow down) altering it.
Otherwise, we're falling into the same trap we have over and over again where the environment gets knocked out of whack -- such as the accidental introduction of a new species which proceeds to take over -- and we try to take a two-by-four and whack it in the other direction -- say, by introducing a predator to control that species -- and every time we're surprised when instead of correcting the course, it goes off careening in another direction -- the introduced predator ignores the target species and overruns the ecosystem itself.
Take the ozone hole, for instance. We thought CFCs were these wonderful inert compounds that we could use safely. A few decades later, we find out that the one thing they do interact with -- ozone under high-UV conditions -- is extremely important to our continued health. The solution was not to launch some new UV shielding particle into the upper atmosphere -- god knows what side effects that would have had -- but to stop using CFCs, switch to something else, and let things sort themselves out.
Until we know a hell of a lot more than we do about climatology, we're better off minimizing our interference than trying to counteract it.
a scenario such as a student athlete posting photos of themself wearing a Kent State athletics uniform and holding a Nazi flag
Yep, totally out of line... and could still be done on MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, Geocities, or a personal website. Or sent to friends by email or instant messenger. Or sent directly from cell phone to cell phone. Or printed and photocopied. It still has the potential to get out. Should the university ban student athletes from owning camera phones, because they could use them to make the university look bad? How about using email or IM? Or, to make a more accurate comparison, should the university ban them just from using Motorola camera phones?
I'm a huge supporter of free speech but I don't think it gives people the right to be irresponsible and immature simply because they're students, athletes, or both.
1. Where'd this "right to be irresponsible" come from? That's a total non-sequitur.
2. You support free speech, but you'd prefer a blanket ban over making people act responsibly in the first place?
One one hand, this policy is overkill. If you're going to block athletes from social networking sites because they might post something that makes the university look bad, you might as well keep them out of classes because they might cheat and make the university look bad.
On the other hand, it's likely to be astonishingly ineffective, because there are so many other places that athletes could go to act badly without running afoul of the ban.
It's like trying to make your city look good not by cleaning up the streets, but by hiding the crime statistics -- except you're not even hiding the crime statistics, you're keeping them out of one of five local newspapers.
Instead the point is to get the product at a CHEAPER price than standard
Unless you're looking for something that's no longer available through "standard" channels. In this case it's not just a matter of picking your auctions carefully, it's a matter of spreading things out over time.
Unless you want something very specific, or you're in a hurry, you don't have to rely on winning one auction. It's more like fishing with multiple poles. You cast out several lines over a certain period of time, and figure maybe 1 in 4 will actually catch anything. Who cares if line #1 doesn't get any fish, or even #2, if you get one on #3?
As an example: over the last few months, I've started picking up a series of comic books from the 1940s. You can't just go to a store and buy them, because only a small percentage of comic stores even carry books that old. Your best bets are to visit collectibles fairs, comic-book conventions, and online stores -- and even those tend to focus on the rare or higher-quality books that cost in the $100-$10,000 range. Ebay, on the other hand, has a steady stream of stores, individual collectors, and people who find old comics in their attics, selling everything from the ultra-rare first appearance of whoever to the torn, soda-stained but still readable random issue of series X. So for the most part, I just bid my max on any auction that fits the criteria, and figure I'll only win a fraction of them. So far it's worked out pretty well.
Yeah, but wouldn't it make more sense for them to tell their student athletes not to post incriminating information than to simply ban them from using a communication forum? Or better yet, rely on such information to enforce the code of conduct, instead of trying to sweep violations under the rug?
I mean, what you seem to be saying is that the Duke Lacrosse incident would have been OK, as long as no one found out about it.
It's one thing to say, "don't post pictures of yourself violating the code of conduct." It's another to say, "don't post pictures of yourself at all," or "don't post anything on site X" -- when sites W, Y and Z are just as accessible.