Take, for instance, the wget vulnerabilities listed in TFA. There's eight of them. Open them up, and you'll see that they're all the same pair of CVEs (CAN-2004-1487 and CAN-2004-1488) -- just updated every time a new distro releases a patch. That's a lot of redundancy -- the equivalent of reporting a bug in Windows Media Player separately for Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, etc.
I have to wonder about the purpose of this article, as it ought to be fairly easy to run "grep -vi update" on the list and get more accurate numbers.
This reminds me of the time that an issue of Sandman won the World Fantasy Award, and the committee immediately changed the rules to prevent a comic book from ever winning again.
As for the Hugos, it looks like one comic actually managed to win: They created a one-off "Other Forms" category in 1988 for Watchmen.
I could not log back into Gmail no matter what I did
I used to have problems with logging into sites on Opera. There was a period of time when I had to log into my.opera.com using Firefox (oh, the irony!). It turns out that Opera's behind-the-scenes cookie management is not always intuitive.
I wrote up my findings last summer, but the basic issue is with cookie permissions. "Treat as specified in Server Manager" seems to ignore any cookies that you haven't explicitly allowed in the Manage Cookies dialog, and some sites require you to accept third-party cookies. From what I can tell, there are situations in which site1.example.com sets a cookie for example.com (so that site2.example.com can read it), but the cookie is interpreted as a third-party cookie, so if you have told Opera to block third-party cookies it'll just ignore the cookie, preventing you from logging in.
I do not think it has benefitted Netscape much either.
Actually, he's right about that part, if you look at it from a corporate perspective. Mozilla wasn't able to save Netscape -- the company and brand name -- from Microsoft or from AOL. It was, however, able to spin off a new, successful project from the original Netscape browser.
It's kind of like how comparitively open hardware helped IBM's PC platform win the PC vs. Mac war, but IBM itself lost marketshare to competitors and eventually wrote off its PC manufacturing division.
It's not even really a compliance test. It's a kick in the pants for browser developers to fill in a bunch of unused corners of the specs (in the hopes that they'll one day be usable).
Passing Acid2 doesn't mean you comply with CSS 2.1, HTML 4.01, or any other spec -- it just means you correctly implement the particular rules that Acid2 tests. It's theoretically possible for browser A to pass 90% of the spec and not pass Acid2, and browser B to pass 85% of the spec including Acid2.
So far Safari, Konqueror, and iCab have passed, and Opera is very close (Opera 9 preview 1 has something like one Acid2 bug left, and they may have fixed it in internal builds by now.) We'll probably see Firefox catching up in 2.0 or 3.0 (I can't remeber which is going to use Gecko 1.9).
There are may reasons to use Opera, but a preview release nearly passing Acid2 isn't one of them.
What's really funny is that a few weeks ago, people were citing gbrowser.com as "evidence" of a Google takeover of Opera.
Just goes to show that wild speculation never disappears, it just changes in the details. Hmm, kind of like urban legends. There may be something to that...
The rich-text editor for posting requires features that Opera and Safari haven't implemented yet. People using those browsers will have to write their posts using the regular plain-text editor. (IMO, given the code that the rich editor generates, that's not a huge loss...)
Opera 9 preview 1 is able to use the rich editor. I'm not sure what Safari is missing, so I don't know how far away Safari support is. The rich editor WordPress uses is TinyMCE, so you can check out their compatibility chart. Safari 2.0 and Opera 9p1 are both listed as "partially working," though there's no further detail.
It's possible, given the amazing feats of early civilizations, that humans were MORE intelligent 6000 years ago than we are today. That, however, would seem to contradict the evolutionary orthodoxy.
No contradiction at all, if selection pressure is stronger on other traits than it is on intelligence.
Remember, evolution doesn't guarantee that future generations will improve in the ways we think they should. It guarantees that future generations will improve in traits which result in more successful breeding. If an environment makes it more likely that strong-and-dumb individuals will breed than weak-and-smart ones, future generations will get stronger and dumber.
Think about that the next time you look at a product safety warning that tells you "WARNING! Product will be hot when heated!"
Hah! That reminds me of a story someone told me about a guy who was extremely proud of his 100% American-made car, none of that foreign stuff, who opened the hood only to see the letters MITSUBISHI stamped on the engine.
I found myself thinking of that story a couple of years ago when one of the major Japanese auto manufacturers made their US factories a central point of their latest ad campaign.
They certainly have the technical ability to read it. As to whether they allow their admins and spam fighters to read it? Good question. It may be covered in the Terms of Service.
you should auto scrub your list when mail server your sending to newsletter gives you "550 Mailbox no longer valid"
...subject to some minimum amount of time to allow for temporary errors when the server crashes and the admin only gets it halfway back up, or someone breaks the config, or the domain name or hosting contract expires and mail gets routed to a parking server until it's renewed, etc.
Typically, no one notices the disasters that get prevented, only the ones that actually hit. How many times did people dismiss the need to improve the levees above New Orleans?
Caltech has a long tradition of pranks as well. Not sure if they still do it, and even these stories are second-hand, but senior ditch day was a tradition in which seniors would go off campus and booby-trap their rooms, while underclassmen tried to break in. Depending on the fiendishness of the defenses, the underclassmen would carry out various levels of pranks upon entering the room.
One example: Someone once poured a concrete barrier behind his door. An underclassman, catching wind of it, messed with the mix beforehand so that it wouldn't set properly and was easily removed.
My favorite, of course, is the group that disassembled a car and reassembled it inside the room, in working order.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything's shiny, Cap'n!
Take, for instance, the wget vulnerabilities listed in TFA. There's eight of them. Open them up, and you'll see that they're all the same pair of CVEs (CAN-2004-1487 and CAN-2004-1488) -- just updated every time a new distro releases a patch. That's a lot of redundancy -- the equivalent of reporting a bug in Windows Media Player separately for Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, etc.
I have to wonder about the purpose of this article, as it ought to be fairly easy to run "grep -vi update" on the list and get more accurate numbers.
This reminds me of the time that an issue of Sandman won the World Fantasy Award, and the committee immediately changed the rules to prevent a comic book from ever winning again.
As for the Hugos, it looks like one comic actually managed to win: They created a one-off "Other Forms" category in 1988 for Watchmen.
After all, he walked out of the hugos over the rise of fantasy. Now video games? Bah!
I believe the feature ("g foobar") is a default in Opera.
Me, I just use the search box in both.
I've seen it from time to time. I think it's only Flash ads that have the problem.
I could not log back into Gmail no matter what I did
I used to have problems with logging into sites on Opera. There was a period of time when I had to log into my.opera.com using Firefox (oh, the irony!). It turns out that Opera's behind-the-scenes cookie management is not always intuitive.
I wrote up my findings last summer, but the basic issue is with cookie permissions. "Treat as specified in Server Manager" seems to ignore any cookies that you haven't explicitly allowed in the Manage Cookies dialog, and some sites require you to accept third-party cookies. From what I can tell, there are situations in which site1.example.com sets a cookie for example.com (so that site2.example.com can read it), but the cookie is interpreted as a third-party cookie, so if you have told Opera to block third-party cookies it'll just ignore the cookie, preventing you from logging in.
Hope this helps
I do not think it has benefitted Netscape much either.
Actually, he's right about that part, if you look at it from a corporate perspective. Mozilla wasn't able to save Netscape -- the company and brand name -- from Microsoft or from AOL. It was, however, able to spin off a new, successful project from the original Netscape browser.
It's kind of like how comparitively open hardware helped IBM's PC platform win the PC vs. Mac war, but IBM itself lost marketshare to competitors and eventually wrote off its PC manufacturing division.
When is the last time you've heard a product rep. assert that they're trying to make their product smaller?
Well, the last time I was at a nanotech conference...
I think it's straight-forward dry wit, though it's always easier to pull off in person than in text.
It's not even really a compliance test. It's a kick in the pants for browser developers to fill in a bunch of unused corners of the specs (in the hopes that they'll one day be usable).
Passing Acid2 doesn't mean you comply with CSS 2.1, HTML 4.01, or any other spec -- it just means you correctly implement the particular rules that Acid2 tests. It's theoretically possible for browser A to pass 90% of the spec and not pass Acid2, and browser B to pass 85% of the spec including Acid2.
So far Safari, Konqueror, and iCab have passed, and Opera is very close (Opera 9 preview 1 has something like one Acid2 bug left, and they may have fixed it in internal builds by now.) We'll probably see Firefox catching up in 2.0 or 3.0 (I can't remeber which is going to use Gecko 1.9).
There are may reasons to use Opera, but a preview release nearly passing Acid2 isn't one of them.
What's really funny is that a few weeks ago, people were citing gbrowser.com as "evidence" of a Google takeover of Opera.
Just goes to show that wild speculation never disappears, it just changes in the details. Hmm, kind of like urban legends. There may be something to that...
Yeah, these questions were asked in 2005!
This is a piece of speculation that's inside a piece of gossip that's inside a bloody "Predictions for 2006" article.
Slashdot: Where even the summary writers don't always read the articles.
(It's amazing how often "X contemplates Y happening" has become "According to X, Y will happen" lately.)
The rich-text editor for posting requires features that Opera and Safari haven't implemented yet. People using those browsers will have to write their posts using the regular plain-text editor. (IMO, given the code that the rich editor generates, that's not a huge loss...)
Opera 9 preview 1 is able to use the rich editor. I'm not sure what Safari is missing, so I don't know how far away Safari support is. The rich editor WordPress uses is TinyMCE, so you can check out their compatibility chart. Safari 2.0 and Opera 9p1 are both listed as "partially working," though there's no further detail.
It's possible, given the amazing feats of early civilizations, that humans were MORE intelligent 6000 years ago than we are today. That, however, would seem to contradict the evolutionary orthodoxy.
No contradiction at all, if selection pressure is stronger on other traits than it is on intelligence.
Remember, evolution doesn't guarantee that future generations will improve in the ways we think they should. It guarantees that future generations will improve in traits which result in more successful breeding. If an environment makes it more likely that strong-and-dumb individuals will breed than weak-and-smart ones, future generations will get stronger and dumber.
Think about that the next time you look at a product safety warning that tells you "WARNING! Product will be hot when heated!"
Actually, polynesian ocean voyages are quite well documented. And Hawaii has only been inhabited for 1500-2000 years, IIRC.
Hah! That reminds me of a story someone told me about a guy who was extremely proud of his 100% American-made car, none of that foreign stuff, who opened the hood only to see the letters MITSUBISHI stamped on the engine.
I found myself thinking of that story a couple of years ago when one of the major Japanese auto manufacturers made their US factories a central point of their latest ad campaign.
I wouldn't think that your AMD system would ever have had an Intel inside.
Upgraded piece by piece over the course of 11 years. Started as an Intel 486, then a Kingston TurboChip, then AMD chips since them.
'Intel Inside' No More? My AMD system hasn't had an Intel inside for several years...
They certainly have the technical ability to read it. As to whether they allow their admins and spam fighters to read it? Good question. It may be covered in the Terms of Service.
...subject to some minimum amount of time to allow for temporary errors when the server crashes and the admin only gets it halfway back up, or someone breaks the config, or the domain name or hosting contract expires and mail gets routed to a parking server until it's renewed, etc.
They sound as sophisticated as a bunch of Aristocrats!
Typically, no one notices the disasters that get prevented, only the ones that actually hit. How many times did people dismiss the need to improve the levees above New Orleans?
Caltech has a long tradition of pranks as well. Not sure if they still do it, and even these stories are second-hand, but senior ditch day was a tradition in which seniors would go off campus and booby-trap their rooms, while underclassmen tried to break in. Depending on the fiendishness of the defenses, the underclassmen would carry out various levels of pranks upon entering the room.
One example: Someone once poured a concrete barrier behind his door. An underclassman, catching wind of it, messed with the mix beforehand so that it wouldn't set properly and was easily removed.
My favorite, of course, is the group that disassembled a car and reassembled it inside the room, in working order.