Nah, people just don't care much about interracial relationships unless they're black and white. Race relationships in the US are still stuck in fallout from the Civil War. Slavery was abolished 140 years ago, but it's still White vs. Black, sometimes White vs. Latino if you live in the Southwest. Anyone else has to yell five times as hard just to get noticed, even today.
A white/Cuban marriage, even though it took some effort to get on the air, simply wasn't anywhere near as shocking as a single interracial kiss between a white man and a black woman -- whatever show the first one was on.
Wait... depending on which show/movie you're watching*, the Borg have either a hive mind or a hive queen. Either way, individuality does not exist for a borg drone unless he or she is cut off from the collective.
The only way to accurately portray the Borg would be if they were all directed by one massively-multitasking director. Of necessity, that would make them controlled by the server (though I suppose you could distribute decisions among peers) -- In other words, Borg would have to be NPCs.
I suppose you could have an ex-Borg player class with characters like Hugh or Seven of Nine, or have an entire ship's worth of Borg played by a single player, but still...
*I've seen maybe 5 episodes each of Voyager and Enterprise, so it's entirely possible they've altered the concept again and I haven't noticed.
Wow. Either your post is flamebait or it represents an incredible misunderstanding of HIV transmission. You do realize that it's damn hard to spread HIV, right?
It's not communicable through air, water, mosquitos, etc. This isn't ebola, cholera, or even the flu in terms of transmission. Unless you come directly into contact with certain bodily fluids -- and we're talking things like blood & semen here, not sweat -- and there's a break in your skin to allow it in, it's not going to get transmitted.
In other words, you have to exchange blood, have sex, etc. with the person. I wouldn't recommend putting an HIV-positive person in a boxing ring, or getting into a knife fight, or having unprotected sex -- but sharing a subway? Big fraggin' deal.
Quarantine is about preventing transmission. You can effectively quarantine HIV by limiting patients' sexual contact and preventing exposure to their blood (transfusions, contaminated needles, injuries, etc.). You don't need to physically quarantine people unless their mere presence is enough to transmit the disease.
SARS shut down travel in affected areas because it was airborne. All you had to do was be in the same room as an infected person, just like the common cold... or the flu.
I hate it when people decide to take down a website in preparation for a relaunch. Unless you've got bandwidth issues -- which may be the case given that the/. story linked directly to an SFx post -- or you're permanently wiping out the old content -- which isn't likely here -- you're better off doing your development offline and then uploading it when it's ready.
So people get to read your old content while you're developing new stuff. Big deal. If someone's looking for it, and you want to keep it available, they ought to be able to find it. Otherwise all you're doing is shutting out your audience for no good reason.
I guess it's still in working draft at WhatWG, but as far as getting other guys to support it -- we now have it in Safari 2.0 (the original implementation, IIRC), Firefox 1.5, and the Opera 9 preview.
They'd already more-or-less frozen the rendering engine for 1.5 when Acid2 was released in early April. Remember, this was originally planned for a midsummer release as Firefox 1.1. All the Acid2-related work is going on in Gecko 1.9 which will probably form the basis of Firefox 2.0. (Firefox 1.0 used Gecko 1.7, and Firefox 1.5 uses Gecko 1.8.)
Opera was in similar straits, even though they basically wrote the test -- they were just putting the finishing touches on Opera 8.0, which came out barely a week later. Of course, that means they started a new development cycle just afterward, and in-house versions of Opera are reportedly very close to passing.
Opera 9 and Firefox 2.0 are likely to pass Acid2 along with Safari 2.0.2, iCab 3 (if they ever release a final version), and Konqueror 4.0 (or does 3.5 include the fixes?) IE7 almost certainly will not. IE8? Who knows?
Another poster has provided the link, but just to clarify, this bug only affects Linux. (It also happens with things like "Save As..." and "Save image as...")
It is really annoying, but unfortunately they didn't get a patch until late in the release cycle. I'm hoping that the distros will just add the patch when they build their own packages -- and that the fix will find its way into 1.5.1 when it comes along.
To be fair, extension writers have already had several weeks of release candidates to test with and determine whether their extensions need changes or just updated compatibility info.
As for anecdotal evidence: I've got about 10 extensions on this machine running RC3 with no problems, and maybe 15-20 on another -- again, no problems.
IIRC the rationale is that (a) there are many different RPM-based distributions with different requirements and (b) many of those distributions include Firefox anyway, so releasing an RPM for current versions of Fedora or SuSE is just a duplication of effort.
I've got first-hand experience with (a) building RPMs for the Dillo web browser, and let me tell you, it's a pain to keep a zillion different distros and/or mach roots and/or UML virtual machines so that you can build packages with the right set of libraries.
As for (b), there are still some differences, since each distro has its own policies on updates. Fedora Core has released new RPMs for Firefox 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc. though 1.0.7, while Mandriva sometimes updates to the latest point release and sometimes backports the patches. The latest mozilla-firefox RPM for Mandriva 2006 is version 1.0.6, but the browser itself is roughly equivalent to 1.0.7
All that said, Opera seems to have decided it's worth the effort, as you can download a couple of dozen possible RPMs -- though that may be in part because it's built into fewer distributions.
The fact that it identifies itself as Explorer (to avoid issues with pages that deliver broken HTML) doesn't allow to have accurate usage statistics,
Argh! Can we please kill this myth?
Opera identifies itself by default as "[MSIE ID] Opera/version" It doesn't hide the fact that it's Opera. It's basically saying "Oh, hey, I'm IE (just kidding, I'm really Opera)" It's no different from the way IE still identifies itself as old-school Netscape: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE/version; etc.)"
Any stats package that's paying attention can tell that it's Opera and not IE. Any stats package that doesn't is broken.
Similarly, any browser detection script that's paying attention can tell it's Opera -- but the purpose of identifying itself as IE is to catch the simplistic scripts whose authors haven't really thought through what they're doing and just want to check for what 1999 considered a "modern" browser.
Acid2 checks a bunch of relatively obscure cases that had remained unimplemented or incorrectly implemented in every major browser. The intent wasn't to determine a browser's level of CSS support, but to encourage browser vendors to fill in the gaps in their implementations.
At the time it was released, no browser passed it. Since then, Safari, beta versions of iCab, and CVS versions of Konqueror have passed. Opera's in-house development versions are getting very close -- they basically have one bug left. Opera was finalizing the 8.0 release when they developed the test, so they put all the Acid2 effort into 9.0 -- just as Firefox was basically frozen for 1.5, so all of Firefox's Acid2 work is going on in the trunk that will eventually become Firefox 2.0.
It's theoretically possible for one browser to pass Acid2 but actually implement less of CSS than another browser that does not, if the missing features don't impact the rendering of the Acid2 page. Just looking at W3C's CSS Test Suites should give you an idea of how complicated CSS compliance is.
Practical considerations such as limited RAM and addressing space shouldn't impede theoretical mathematics. Consider this PHP code (not tested, may have typos):
Since $n can be any natural number (remember, we're assuming no limit on the numbers that this theoretical computer can handle), and the set of natural numbers is infinite, the set of potential web pages that can be generated with this algorithm is infinite.
It's not a particularly interesting set of documents, but it's also clearly a subset of all possible HTML pages, which means that that set must also be infinite.
As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status.
You haven't read many arguments over ActiveX, have you?
That said, Opera 8 on Linux is IMO comparable in performance to Firefox or Seamonkey, and sometimes better. I've been using it occasionally since 5.0 (well, since 3.6 if you go back to my pre-Linux days), and I think 8.0 was the first Linux version of Opera to achieve parity with the Windows version. I've tried out the Mac version from time to time, but it doesn't seem to have caught up yet.
That doesn't say much about how many of your visitors use Opera, because Opera by default identifies itself as some version of Internet Explorer.
Insightful? What Slashdot needs is a -1 Misinformation mod. This meme has been floating around for ages, but as other posters have pointed out, any stats package that is paying attention can tell that it's Opera even under the default identification. It doesn't really disguise itself as IE, it says, "I'm IE (OK, not really, I'm Opera, but I got your attention, didn't I?)" It's kind of like wearing a green T-shirt with the word "Red" on it.
They're both subsets so far -- and unfortunately they're not the same subsets. Opera 8 supports SVG Tiny. Mozilla intends to implement SVG Full eventually, but the current SVG support in Firefox 1.5 is still missing quite a bit.
So some features work in both browsers, some only work in Opera, and some only work in Firefox.
Opera stays in the web browser headlines for the same reason that Apple stays in the PC headlines: They keep pushing the envelope. Opera's pioneered a lot of browser UI -- mouse gestures, MDI, integrated search boxes. Back in 2000 you could take two Opera subwindows, link them together, and have all links from one window open in the other. There's probably a Firefox extension somewhere, but I can't think of another browser that does that. And while they weren't the first to implement CSS, the main author of the original spec, Håkon Wium Lie, has been an Opera exec for 5 or 6 years.
So sure, they don't have the marketshare, particularly not in the web audience as a whole -- but they've got a large chunk of mindshare within the browser community.
it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.
Heh. Hah. HA HAHA HAHAHA!
*ahem*
Sorry about that.
"W3C Compliant" is much easier to define for a website than for a web browser. Why? A compliant website uses only features defined in the W3C specs, or only uses other features in ways that will gracefully degrade in compliant browsers (though some purists will object to the latter definition).
For a browser, does it mean something that implements every part of a W3C standard? Or one that implements part of a standard but makes sure not to contradict it anywhere? Is it OK if it implements nonstandard features like those used in AJAX? And which standards? HTML, CSS and JavaScript/ECMAScript are a good start, but what about SVG? XHTML? XForms?
The specs are complex enough that there still is no web browser that implements all of even the current versions of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. At best, you can measure relative compliance, in which case Firefox and company, Opera, and Safari are all well ahead of even IE7. But waiting for a "W3C Compliant" browser is going to take a while.
Heh. I know this is a joke, but a few years ago I watched a lunar eclipse from my balcony. At one point one of my neighbors came out and started taking pictures of the moon -- with the flash. One can just mean you forgot to turn it off, but two or more?
It reminded me of the people you occasionally see at Disneyland taking flash photos in Star Tours, not realizing they're likely to get a washed-out white screen instead of a picture of the Death Star.
Way back in high school, I used to have a "zero period" class that started at 7:00am. I'd start walking to school early enough that Venus was still quite visible, and I'd try to keep it in view as long as possible as the sky lightened.
saw a shapely lass walking around with two STP stickers on instead of a normal top... Although I am not sure if this is classed as hardware or software....
Going by cyberpunk terminology, humans are usually classified as wetware... but somehow that just sounds wrong in this context. (Nudge, nudge, wink wink, say no more!)
Many GM seeds have been designed so that the crops will not produce seeds, and so, can't reproduce in the wild.
And, of course, farmers can't save it for seed for the next season, requiring them to keep buying from the supplier. Convenient, that.
This does pretty well eliminate the possibility of it spreading.
I know it's standard hybridization and not genetic modification in the sense we usually use it, but I've found quite a few seeds in "seedless" watermelons.
The way I see it, if aliens have the ability to attack SETI computers, what's to stop them from attacking any other computer on the planet? There are enough computer systems hooked into satellite TV feeds, and if the aliens are close enough to respond to us via radio waves in the first place, they're close enough to insert something malicious into satellite TV transmissions.
Otherwise, you have to assume that someone sent out malicious signals with no knowledge of when we would develop computers, how our computers would work, etc.
They killed off the space sets? Damn! Those were my favorites until I started on Technic. It's probably been 10-15 years since I've bought any Legos, but my Lego collection is one of those things from my childhood that I just can't bring myself to sell off.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, people just don't care much about interracial relationships unless they're black and white. Race relationships in the US are still stuck in fallout from the Civil War. Slavery was abolished 140 years ago, but it's still White vs. Black, sometimes White vs. Latino if you live in the Southwest. Anyone else has to yell five times as hard just to get noticed, even today.
A white/Cuban marriage, even though it took some effort to get on the air, simply wasn't anywhere near as shocking as a single interracial kiss between a white man and a black woman -- whatever show the first one was on.
Wait... depending on which show/movie you're watching*, the Borg have either a hive mind or a hive queen. Either way, individuality does not exist for a borg drone unless he or she is cut off from the collective.
The only way to accurately portray the Borg would be if they were all directed by one massively-multitasking director. Of necessity, that would make them controlled by the server (though I suppose you could distribute decisions among peers) -- In other words, Borg would have to be NPCs.
I suppose you could have an ex-Borg player class with characters like Hugh or Seven of Nine, or have an entire ship's worth of Borg played by a single player, but still...
*I've seen maybe 5 episodes each of Voyager and Enterprise, so it's entirely possible they've altered the concept again and I haven't noticed.
Wow. Either your post is flamebait or it represents an incredible misunderstanding of HIV transmission. You do realize that it's damn hard to spread HIV, right?
It's not communicable through air, water, mosquitos, etc. This isn't ebola, cholera, or even the flu in terms of transmission. Unless you come directly into contact with certain bodily fluids -- and we're talking things like blood & semen here, not sweat -- and there's a break in your skin to allow it in, it's not going to get transmitted.
In other words, you have to exchange blood, have sex, etc. with the person. I wouldn't recommend putting an HIV-positive person in a boxing ring, or getting into a knife fight, or having unprotected sex -- but sharing a subway? Big fraggin' deal.
Quarantine is about preventing transmission. You can effectively quarantine HIV by limiting patients' sexual contact and preventing exposure to their blood (transfusions, contaminated needles, injuries, etc.). You don't need to physically quarantine people unless their mere presence is enough to transmit the disease.
SARS shut down travel in affected areas because it was airborne. All you had to do was be in the same room as an infected person, just like the common cold... or the flu.
I hate it when people decide to take down a website in preparation for a relaunch. Unless you've got bandwidth issues -- which may be the case given that the /. story linked directly to an SFx post -- or you're permanently wiping out the old content -- which isn't likely here -- you're better off doing your development offline and then uploading it when it's ready.
So people get to read your old content while you're developing new stuff. Big deal. If someone's looking for it, and you want to keep it available, they ought to be able to find it. Otherwise all you're doing is shutting out your audience for no good reason.
I guess it's still in working draft at WhatWG, but as far as getting other guys to support it -- we now have it in Safari 2.0 (the original implementation, IIRC), Firefox 1.5, and the Opera 9 preview.
Or did you mean getting IE to support it?
They'd already more-or-less frozen the rendering engine for 1.5 when Acid2 was released in early April. Remember, this was originally planned for a midsummer release as Firefox 1.1. All the Acid2-related work is going on in Gecko 1.9 which will probably form the basis of Firefox 2.0. (Firefox 1.0 used Gecko 1.7, and Firefox 1.5 uses Gecko 1.8.)
Opera was in similar straits, even though they basically wrote the test -- they were just putting the finishing touches on Opera 8.0, which came out barely a week later. Of course, that means they started a new development cycle just afterward, and in-house versions of Opera are reportedly very close to passing.
Opera 9 and Firefox 2.0 are likely to pass Acid2 along with Safari 2.0.2, iCab 3 (if they ever release a final version), and Konqueror 4.0 (or does 3.5 include the fixes?) IE7 almost certainly will not. IE8? Who knows?
Another poster has provided the link, but just to clarify, this bug only affects Linux. (It also happens with things like "Save As..." and "Save image as...")
It is really annoying, but unfortunately they didn't get a patch until late in the release cycle. I'm hoping that the distros will just add the patch when they build their own packages -- and that the fix will find its way into 1.5.1 when it comes along.
To be fair, extension writers have already had several weeks of release candidates to test with and determine whether their extensions need changes or just updated compatibility info.
As for anecdotal evidence: I've got about 10 extensions on this machine running RC3 with no problems, and maybe 15-20 on another -- again, no problems.
IIRC the rationale is that (a) there are many different RPM-based distributions with different requirements and (b) many of those distributions include Firefox anyway, so releasing an RPM for current versions of Fedora or SuSE is just a duplication of effort.
I've got first-hand experience with (a) building RPMs for the Dillo web browser, and let me tell you, it's a pain to keep a zillion different distros and/or mach roots and/or UML virtual machines so that you can build packages with the right set of libraries.
As for (b), there are still some differences, since each distro has its own policies on updates. Fedora Core has released new RPMs for Firefox 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc. though 1.0.7, while Mandriva sometimes updates to the latest point release and sometimes backports the patches. The latest mozilla-firefox RPM for Mandriva 2006 is version 1.0.6, but the browser itself is roughly equivalent to 1.0.7
All that said, Opera seems to have decided it's worth the effort, as you can download a couple of dozen possible RPMs -- though that may be in part because it's built into fewer distributions.
The fact that it identifies itself as Explorer (to avoid issues with pages that deliver broken HTML) doesn't allow to have accurate usage statistics,
Argh! Can we please kill this myth?
Opera identifies itself by default as "[MSIE ID] Opera/version" It doesn't hide the fact that it's Opera. It's basically saying "Oh, hey, I'm IE (just kidding, I'm really Opera)" It's no different from the way IE still identifies itself as old-school Netscape: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE/version; etc.)"
Any stats package that's paying attention can tell that it's Opera and not IE. Any stats package that doesn't is broken.
Similarly, any browser detection script that's paying attention can tell it's Opera -- but the purpose of identifying itself as IE is to catch the simplistic scripts whose authors haven't really thought through what they're doing and just want to check for what 1999 considered a "modern" browser.
Acid2 checks a bunch of relatively obscure cases that had remained unimplemented or incorrectly implemented in every major browser. The intent wasn't to determine a browser's level of CSS support, but to encourage browser vendors to fill in the gaps in their implementations.
At the time it was released, no browser passed it. Since then, Safari, beta versions of iCab, and CVS versions of Konqueror have passed. Opera's in-house development versions are getting very close -- they basically have one bug left. Opera was finalizing the 8.0 release when they developed the test, so they put all the Acid2 effort into 9.0 -- just as Firefox was basically frozen for 1.5, so all of Firefox's Acid2 work is going on in the trunk that will eventually become Firefox 2.0.
It's theoretically possible for one browser to pass Acid2 but actually implement less of CSS than another browser that does not, if the missing features don't impact the rendering of the Acid2 page. Just looking at W3C's CSS Test Suites should give you an idea of how complicated CSS compliance is.
Practical considerations such as limited RAM and addressing space shouldn't impede theoretical mathematics. Consider this PHP code (not tested, may have typos):
// Define $n here
<html>
<head>
<title>Infinite page</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
for ( $x=0; $x < $n; $x++ ) {
print "<p>Line $x</p>";
}
?>
</body>
</html>
Since $n can be any natural number (remember, we're assuming no limit on the numbers that this theoretical computer can handle), and the set of natural numbers is infinite, the set of potential web pages that can be generated with this algorithm is infinite.
It's not a particularly interesting set of documents, but it's also clearly a subset of all possible HTML pages, which means that that set must also be infinite.
You haven't read many arguments over ActiveX, have you?
I can see it being overrated, but a troll?
That said, Opera 8 on Linux is IMO comparable in performance to Firefox or Seamonkey, and sometimes better. I've been using it occasionally since 5.0 (well, since 3.6 if you go back to my pre-Linux days), and I think 8.0 was the first Linux version of Opera to achieve parity with the Windows version. I've tried out the Mac version from time to time, but it doesn't seem to have caught up yet.
That doesn't say much about how many of your visitors use Opera, because Opera by default identifies itself as some version of Internet Explorer.
Insightful? What Slashdot needs is a -1 Misinformation mod. This meme has been floating around for ages, but as other posters have pointed out, any stats package that is paying attention can tell that it's Opera even under the default identification. It doesn't really disguise itself as IE, it says, "I'm IE (OK, not really, I'm Opera, but I got your attention, didn't I?)" It's kind of like wearing a green T-shirt with the word "Red" on it.
They're both subsets so far -- and unfortunately they're not the same subsets. Opera 8 supports SVG Tiny. Mozilla intends to implement SVG Full eventually, but the current SVG support in Firefox 1.5 is still missing quite a bit.
So some features work in both browsers, some only work in Opera, and some only work in Firefox.
Opera stays in the web browser headlines for the same reason that Apple stays in the PC headlines: They keep pushing the envelope. Opera's pioneered a lot of browser UI -- mouse gestures, MDI, integrated search boxes. Back in 2000 you could take two Opera subwindows, link them together, and have all links from one window open in the other. There's probably a Firefox extension somewhere, but I can't think of another browser that does that. And while they weren't the first to implement CSS, the main author of the original spec, Håkon Wium Lie, has been an Opera exec for 5 or 6 years.
So sure, they don't have the marketshare, particularly not in the web audience as a whole -- but they've got a large chunk of mindshare within the browser community.
it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.
Heh. Hah. HA HAHA HAHAHA!
*ahem*
Sorry about that.
"W3C Compliant" is much easier to define for a website than for a web browser. Why? A compliant website uses only features defined in the W3C specs, or only uses other features in ways that will gracefully degrade in compliant browsers (though some purists will object to the latter definition).
For a browser, does it mean something that implements every part of a W3C standard? Or one that implements part of a standard but makes sure not to contradict it anywhere? Is it OK if it implements nonstandard features like those used in AJAX? And which standards? HTML, CSS and JavaScript/ECMAScript are a good start, but what about SVG? XHTML? XForms?
The specs are complex enough that there still is no web browser that implements all of even the current versions of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. At best, you can measure relative compliance, in which case Firefox and company, Opera, and Safari are all well ahead of even IE7. But waiting for a "W3C Compliant" browser is going to take a while.
Heh. I know this is a joke, but a few years ago I watched a lunar eclipse from my balcony. At one point one of my neighbors came out and started taking pictures of the moon -- with the flash. One can just mean you forgot to turn it off, but two or more?
It reminded me of the people you occasionally see at Disneyland taking flash photos in Star Tours, not realizing they're likely to get a washed-out white screen instead of a picture of the Death Star.
I am so going to have to try this tomorrow.
Way back in high school, I used to have a "zero period" class that started at 7:00am. I'd start walking to school early enough that Venus was still quite visible, and I'd try to keep it in view as long as possible as the sky lightened.
Going by cyberpunk terminology, humans are usually classified as wetware... but somehow that just sounds wrong in this context. (Nudge, nudge, wink wink, say no more!)
And, of course, farmers can't save it for seed for the next season, requiring them to keep buying from the supplier. Convenient, that.
I know it's standard hybridization and not genetic modification in the sense we usually use it, but I've found quite a few seeds in "seedless" watermelons.
The way I see it, if aliens have the ability to attack SETI computers, what's to stop them from attacking any other computer on the planet? There are enough computer systems hooked into satellite TV feeds, and if the aliens are close enough to respond to us via radio waves in the first place, they're close enough to insert something malicious into satellite TV transmissions.
Otherwise, you have to assume that someone sent out malicious signals with no knowledge of when we would develop computers, how our computers would work, etc.
What went wrong is they charge $200 for a toy.
And yet Microsoft had no problem selling their $400 toy last week.
They killed off the space sets? Damn! Those were my favorites until I started on Technic. It's probably been 10-15 years since I've bought any Legos, but my Lego collection is one of those things from my childhood that I just can't bring myself to sell off.