: As long as we're trading unsubstantiated anecdotes, let me say that my experience with Karmic Koala has been perfectly smooth. I have it running natively on one machine and inside a VirtualBox VM on another, and in both instances both the install process and the system as a whole have worked very satisfyingly.
not so lucky with mac parallels. fresh install crashes with being unable to detect optical drive (on which it is booting). not too sure whose's at fault here (appears to be an old kernel problem resurfacing), but mac parallels has a history of delayed ubuntu support. it took 4 months (2 months before the karmic arrived) before jaunty had parallel tools support.
parallels desktop 4.0 already supports win7 - and that speaks volumes since microsoft's release cycle is rather haphazard while ubuntu's is regular at 6 month intervals. it seems support for arguably the largest/most popular linux distribution[1] is being sidelined - and not for any technical reasons. why is it that they're able to keep up with:
: If you have a good firewall and secure applications, the only remaining way to get a virus is if you download it and run it yourself.
a vector i'm seeing a lot of, is going to any copy/print/photo shop with a usb stick & bringing that sick baby home. apparently some mp3 usb sticks come with a read-write tab just like old stiffy diskettes - this really should be the norm to help avoid infection by proxy.
: East Asia, by and large, are doing a very good job at avoiding cultural suicide, by severely restricting mass immigration from poor countries, or countries with lesser-developed cultures. Europe, OTOH, has failed, and with the ghettoization of its inner cities, has only recently woken up to that fact.
socio-economic apartheid, is still apartheid. globalization is already here - take the red pill and "cultural suicide" becomes a melting pot. it's not hard not to imagine your polarized view as veiled xenophobia.
:A DRM ban clause should be added as a constitution
you wouldn't have to go around fixing things... or sighing in dismay when bad laws are passed... and a constiution would become more of a living document... if new laws were required to pass a constitutionality test.
: Don't get me wrong, "Switch to Ubuntu" (or some other linux distribution) may be the perfect answers for this woman
Things I've noticed which do *NOT* work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 8.04:
* auto-pivot (screens which can rotate 90 degrees for either landscape or portrait, eg Samsung 2243BWX) * high resolution printing (say above 600dpi on Canon MP600) * some keyboard keys are not mapped correctly or used (Logitech Wireless Keyboard, i forget the model)
Older hardware works better - more time for reverse engineering, I suppose.
* it's not UNIVERSAL serial bus if the other end of the cable is allowed to be proprietary. nightmare when travelling and you've forgotten your cable. it's never in the public interest to create a hidden cost (expensive proprietary cables)
* symmetrical design is fine - but make it work whichever way you plug it in
* true hot plugging - it's NOT ok to have to hunt for some crazy "safely remove" option before it's safe to unplug.
* the product will be stable when running windows xp.
* the related software or driver components can be installed or removed easily.
* the basic experience with the product and the operating system will be the same or better after upgrading to future versions of windows.
i agree. aside: holophonic sound can create some interesting positional audio effects using standard stereo. to get an idea, put your headphones on at a medium volume and listen . wait until you get around half way through, and then listen as the sound moves down your left side. cool -- although my gus was doing this in the early 90s.
apparently pink floyd's album, "the final cut", included this effect.
never heard of him. (just checked & mike's host file is a tiny 41k file.) i can recommend andy short's "hosts file project" (http://hostsfile.mine.nu/) which i've been using for years. it's:
- free (gpl) - frequent dns verified updates - user contributions welcomed - a comprehensive 1.5mb (uncompressed) host file (as of 2006-01-17)
bonus: if you're running a local web server on the same machine, you'll be able to:
$ grep --count log "127.0.0.1"
and see how many requests it denied. most of us in south africa are on *non-free* local call dail-up which makes this a relevant bandwidth issue.
: What Google decided to do was provide a partial index, WITH A WARNING
a search for "tiananmen square" on google.cn translates (via simplified chinese through babelfish) as:
"According to the local law laws and regulations and the policy, the part searches the result not to demonstrate."
no link explaining further. if they can't point to chillingeffects.org, they could (ianal) at least be precise and excerpt the local censorship law which would by it's own definition enlighen on exactly *what* was being censored.
- p
Re:How about adding music?
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
crazy, but composer details are not in the default view. (makes them look somewhat incompetent imho.)
see tiny left column titled "Overview". default is "main details" but any link below that (try "combinded details") should give you composer credit.
I've had it. I can't take any more advertising. Television, radio, magazines, billboards, even the Internet for Christ's sake. Everywhere. Why do they keep targeting me? I never did anything to them. I don't even buy anything! They're wasting their time! Fast food makes me feel like shit, soft drinks make me dizzy, candy is disgusting, chips make my stomach hurt, I don't smoke, and any band that has ever been advertised anywhere sucks unequivocally. I eat tortillas and vegetables, I drink tap water. I ride my $40 bike for entertainment. I buy a new pair of Dickies at the army navy store every year and I get all my other clothes at Costco in 3-packs. My car works fine, I use my Internet connection for long distance, I've had the same boots for three years and re-sole them when they wear out. As far as booze goes, well, as long as it's wet.......
So why do they keep attacking me? Why are they filling every square inch of every available space in my life? Above urinals, on concert tickets, underneath the ice at hockey games, on blimps, in video games, as props in movies, plugs in rap songs, on shitty Web Sites (No, I will not visit your motherfucking sponsor. If you're not in it for the love, and you can't figure out any better way to pay for your site than by slapping some ugly, corrupted banner across the top of your pathetic work, then fucking close up shop, kill yourself, and leave the Web to non-polluters). They'd advertise on the backs of my eyelids if they could get away with it, and I can't hack it anymore. They win. I lose. They succeeded. I failed. Like Brian Wilson, I just wasn't built for these times. I fold. Here are all my cards. Keep the pot, keep my ante, keep the goddamn jacket on the back of my chair for all I care, I can get another at Costco. I'll be out in the parking lot getting drunk and yelling at cute girls because I can no longer stand the taste of tentacles. Marketing has poisoned everything worthwhile under the sun, so I'm giving it all up. Everything.
But the way I figure it, there's no real loss. I've seen all of the episodes of the Simpsons 200 times each. Most of the good writing was done 100 years ago. I haven't listened to FM radio in years. I could play all my records beginning to end alphabetically and I'd be 76 years old when I got to the Zeni Geva. Online culture is a fucking yawn, only good for buying stuffed goats on Ebay and getting cracked copies of $1000 software. Movies always end up at the 99 cent video store across the street eventually, and you can fast forward through those commercials. My girlie's cute and the corner bar has Pabst on tap. What else matters?
True, by shutting myself off to everything, I'm probably limiting my future potential as a 'community building' or 'bleeding edge' cog in someone's nightmarish vision of Internet profitability, but fuck, a simple read through my writing should've cured that anyway (Note to potential employers: The bidding starts at $120,000 a year with full dental).
So I'm out. No more.
I just feel bad for those of you I'm leaving behind. You'll be wearing your Slave Labor Nikes, sweating under a Third World Vest, listening to Everqueer or Fratboy Slim, your hair styled stupidly with gasoline and aborted pig placentas, trying to choke down a Double Meat Fuck Splattered Cow Testicles On The Slaughterhouse Floor Pus Coagulated Lactacious Secretion Yellow Dye #2 Deluxe. Man, will you be looking dumb. It makes me want to cry. You poor, oversugared demographic you. You're filling your apartments, your bodies, and your minds with useless junk. You stagger under your own weight, throwing money in random directions until you collapse and die, buried by a bunch of people who you fa
line 242: "#adminfooter label , #adminfooter legend,{". remove the comma at the end of the selector, and then line 488: "#usermenu ul.menu a.end... padding: 5px 11px 0 0 2px;". you've got 5 values for the padding property. it only takes 4 (for top, right, bottom and left, respectively).
other suggestions:
- use descriptive names for classes. i'm seeing things like: #misc, #frame and it's hard to remember what you're styling when you've labelled it in a rush and just given it a placeholder for a name. other class names are bound to locations (like #topnav) which is meta-semantic rather than semantic and confusing since it's easy enough to decide to css position it elsewhere and then you're going to have to change the code again. (the point of css is to separate content from presentation, so take the presentation out of your class names/ids and leave it up to the css properties.) also, there are known quirk issues with underscores in class names, eg your: #index_qlinks-content. rather use hypens.
- for screen media, use a default font of sans-serif (you're using serif). sans-serif is proven easier on the eye on low resolution devices (like your monitor).
- when specifying a colour, you're encouraged to always provide both foreground and background colours in the same css rule, as it's often not obvious what the cascade will do and you can easily end up with illegible text. for example, at least replace your:
a { color: #066; }
with:
a { color: #066; background-color: inherit; }
- you're using a mixture of css unit measurements. if you want text to resize and print easier, try replacing the pixel (px) measurements with ems or percentages (aka fluid layout). or provide a print stylesheet.
- i'm not sure on this[2], but apparently most elements do not have intrinsic width and when you float something you should give it a width even if it's just a width:auto.
Re:It was a good story but....
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 1
...not at good as the original (imho). it put me off trying his next book "market forces". the original (altered carbon) was unadulterated -- perhaps so because it was his first novel.
my distant opinion is that the movie rights he sold (for usd 1m) may have effected his edge.
south africa just (2004-07-15) had a ruling on a similar case: the 3x internet speed increase tv ad. it was upheld by the "self-regulating" advertising standards authority (asa).
i'm skeptical about the ruling. no publicly available references are cited, and it amounts to the word of the appellant (tim dowson) versus 20+ local industries underpinning the asa.
as my rule of thumb, when the claim sounds like a common spam subject line, you'll will ping my bogometer.
The fact is that if you want better pictures, you NEED to go through all of those "useless" features and change them.
i was once in a walmart looking at the digital cameras. only one model was sold out, and from the display pictures i could see it was the *only* model which had but a single button on top...
jef raskin (creator of the macintosh) argues (in "the humane interface) that although devices may necessarily become more complex to handle more complex cases, it should still remain possible to do simple tasks simply.
spell checking, and calculations are points he also raises. it's easier to reach for my desk calculator than try add two numbers together with the computer.
if a natural mappings were used more often, nobody would have trouble setting their vcr time either. (he gives a solution to this in chapter 1, if i recall right!)
Wich is a behaviour that makes it really annoying,
it's annoying because it makes it harder to form a habit. this kind of thing (habituation) is an important part of cognitive science -- which is a vastly overlooked discipline.
if you're interested, i can recommend jef raskin's (yes, the creator of the macintosh) book _the humane interface_.
what exactly does it take to crash Mozilla these days?
recommending mozilla as a more standards compliant browser can be tricky when it introduces it's own browser specific html elements: parsererror and sourcetext.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't an app to automatically switch off a phone when driving is detected.
: If IE still has more than 30% worldwide marketshare, and doesn't have basic requirements for this, its not going to be used. Period.
IE is being retrofitted:
~ Canvas: http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/
~ HTML, CSS, PNG: http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
: Homeopathy is water
well perhaps not even that - i heard the water is allowed to evaporate completely off the sugar pills before bottling.
: As long as we're trading unsubstantiated anecdotes, let me say that my experience with Karmic Koala has been perfectly smooth. I have it running natively on one machine and inside a VirtualBox VM on another, and in both instances both the install process and the system as a whole have worked very satisfyingly.
not so lucky with mac parallels. fresh install crashes with being unable to detect optical drive (on which it is booting). not too sure whose's at fault here (appears to be an old kernel problem resurfacing), but mac parallels has a history of delayed ubuntu support. it took 4 months (2 months before the karmic arrived) before jaunty had parallel tools support.
parallels desktop 4.0 already supports win7 - and that speaks volumes since microsoft's release cycle is rather haphazard while ubuntu's is regular at 6 month intervals. it seems support for arguably the largest/most popular linux distribution[1] is being sidelined - and not for any technical reasons. why is it that they're able to keep up with:
~ freeBSD 7
~ solaris 10
but ubuntu is a second class citizen?
my anecdotal evidence++
: If you have a good firewall and secure applications, the only remaining way to get a virus is if you download it and run it yourself.
a vector i'm seeing a lot of, is going to any copy/print/photo shop with a usb stick & bringing that sick baby home. apparently some mp3 usb sticks come with a read-write tab just like old stiffy diskettes - this really should be the norm to help avoid infection by proxy.
: East Asia, by and large, are doing a very good job at avoiding cultural suicide, by severely restricting mass immigration from poor countries, or countries with lesser-developed cultures. Europe, OTOH, has failed, and with the ghettoization of its inner cities, has only recently woken up to that fact.
socio-economic apartheid, is still apartheid. globalization is already here - take the red pill and "cultural suicide" becomes a melting pot. it's not hard not to imagine your polarized view as veiled xenophobia.
:A DRM ban clause should be added as a constitution
you wouldn't have to go around fixing things... or sighing in dismay when bad laws are passed... and a constiution would become more of a living document... if new laws were required to pass a constitutionality test.
: Don't get me wrong, "Switch to Ubuntu" (or some other linux distribution) may be the perfect answers for this woman
Things I've noticed which do *NOT* work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 8.04:
* auto-pivot (screens which can rotate 90 degrees for either landscape or portrait, eg Samsung 2243BWX)
* high resolution printing (say above 600dpi on Canon MP600)
* some keyboard keys are not mapped correctly or used (Logitech Wireless Keyboard, i forget the model)
Older hardware works better - more time for reverse engineering, I suppose.
3 things i hope they address:
* it's not UNIVERSAL serial bus if the other end of the cable is allowed to be proprietary. nightmare when travelling and you've forgotten your cable. it's never in the public interest to create a hidden cost (expensive proprietary cables)
* symmetrical design is fine - but make it work whichever way you plug it in
* true hot plugging - it's NOT ok to have to hunt for some crazy "safely remove" option before it's safe to unplug.
...the TSA might expand their war on moisture to a war on water? :)
: As opposed to authorized programs, like the Sony backdoor, which used Microsoft-supplied methods to create the program to hide from the users
it's a tad worse than that: microsoft appears to directly support malware by certifying them safe under it's designed for microsoft logo program.
for example: sunncomm's mediamax rookit software carries microsoft's designed for microsoft windows xp logo, which states:
* the product will be stable when running windows xp.
* the related software or driver components can be installed or removed easily.
* the basic experience with the product and the operating system will be the same or better after upgrading to future versions of windows.
each claim is pointedly debunked by reading mark russinovich in sony, rootkits and digital rights management gone too far (october 31, 2005).
even if you do trust microsoft, i would suggest caution in trusting software carrying a microsoft certified logo.
- p
: Re:No point for surround music
i agree. aside: holophonic sound can create some interesting positional audio effects using standard stereo. to get an idea, put your headphones on at a medium volume and listen . wait until you get around half way through, and then listen as the sound moves down your left side. cool -- although my gus was doing this in the early 90s.
apparently pink floyd's album, "the final cut", included this effect.
- p
: Use Mike's ad-blocking hosts file.
never heard of him. (just checked & mike's host file is a tiny 41k file.) i can recommend andy short's "hosts file project" (http://hostsfile.mine.nu/) which i've been using for years. it's:
- free (gpl)
- frequent dns verified updates
- user contributions welcomed
- a comprehensive 1.5mb (uncompressed) host file (as of 2006-01-17)
bonus: if you're running a local web server on the same machine, you'll be able to:
$ grep --count log "127.0.0.1"
and see how many requests it denied. most of us in south africa are on *non-free* local call dail-up which makes this a relevant bandwidth issue.
- p
ps. just checked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file and he's mentioned there. way to go wikipedia!
: What Google decided to do was provide a partial index, WITH A WARNING
a search for "tiananmen square" on google.cn translates (via simplified chinese through babelfish) as:
"According to the local law laws and regulations and the policy, the part searches the result not to demonstrate."
no link explaining further. if they can't point to chillingeffects.org, they could (ianal) at least be precise and excerpt the local censorship law which would by it's own definition enlighen on exactly *what* was being censored.
- p
crazy, but composer details are not in the default view. (makes them look somewhat incompetent imho.)
see tiny left column titled "Overview". default is "main details" but any link below that (try "combinded details") should give you composer credit.
- p
sounds like my bug (supposedly fixed in mozilla 1.8a4).
& whitespace_mode=show&file=nsHTMLTags.cpp&branch=&r oot=/cvsroot&subdir=mozilla/parser/htmlparser/src& command=DIFF_FRAMESET&rev1=1.46&rev2=1.47
/. report on same:6 295508
i found and reported the browser specific elements "parsererror" and "sourcetext" in september 2004: see mozbug 210658.
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210658
you can see the browser specific elements in a source diff:
bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsview2.cgi?diff_mode=context
sadly, i don't believe this fix has been backported to firefox 1.0x.
- p
--
ps. my previous
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=68828&cid=
an e-old, but still good rant. makes me laugh to think of advertisers as aspiring inner eyelid tattooists.
- p
-------------
Market Target
by Mark Driver
http://www.blindwino.com/driverjunk15.html
I've been targeted right out of the market.
I've had it. I can't take any more advertising. Television, radio, magazines, billboards, even the Internet for Christ's sake. Everywhere. Why do they keep targeting me? I never did anything to them. I don't even buy anything! They're wasting their time! Fast food makes me feel like shit, soft drinks make me dizzy, candy is disgusting, chips make my stomach hurt, I don't smoke, and any band that has ever been advertised anywhere sucks unequivocally. I eat tortillas and vegetables, I drink tap water. I ride my $40 bike for entertainment. I buy a new pair of Dickies at the army navy store every year and I get all my other clothes at Costco in 3-packs. My car works fine, I use my Internet connection for long distance, I've had the same boots for three years and re-sole them when they wear out. As far as booze goes, well, as long as it's wet.......
So why do they keep attacking me? Why are they filling every square inch of every available space in my life? Above urinals, on concert tickets, underneath the ice at hockey games, on blimps, in video games, as props in movies, plugs in rap songs, on shitty Web Sites (No, I will not visit your motherfucking sponsor. If you're not in it for the love, and you can't figure out any better way to pay for your site than by slapping some ugly, corrupted banner across the top of your pathetic work, then fucking close up shop, kill yourself, and leave the Web to non-polluters). They'd advertise on the backs of my eyelids if they could get away with it, and I can't hack it anymore. They win. I lose. They succeeded. I failed. Like Brian Wilson, I just wasn't built for these times. I fold. Here are all my cards. Keep the pot, keep my ante, keep the goddamn jacket on the back of my chair for all I care, I can get another at Costco. I'll be out in the parking lot getting drunk and yelling at cute girls because I can no longer stand the taste of tentacles. Marketing has poisoned everything worthwhile under the sun, so I'm giving it all up. Everything.
But the way I figure it, there's no real loss. I've seen all of the episodes of the Simpsons 200 times each. Most of the good writing was done 100 years ago. I haven't listened to FM radio in years. I could play all my records beginning to end alphabetically and I'd be 76 years old when I got to the Zeni Geva. Online culture is a fucking yawn, only good for buying stuffed goats on Ebay and getting cracked copies of $1000 software. Movies always end up at the 99 cent video store across the street eventually, and you can fast forward through those commercials. My girlie's cute and the corner bar has Pabst on tap. What else matters?
True, by shutting myself off to everything, I'm probably limiting my future potential as a 'community building' or 'bleeding edge' cog in someone's nightmarish vision of Internet profitability, but fuck, a simple read through my writing should've cured that anyway (Note to potential employers: The bidding starts at $120,000 a year with full dental).
So I'm out. No more.
I just feel bad for those of you I'm leaving behind. You'll be wearing your Slave Labor Nikes, sweating under a Third World Vest, listening to Everqueer or Fratboy Slim, your hair styled stupidly with gasoline and aborted pig placentas, trying to choke down a Double Meat Fuck Splattered Cow Testicles On The Slaughterhouse Floor Pus Coagulated Lactacious Secretion Yellow Dye #2 Deluxe. Man, will you be looking dumb. It makes me want to cry. You poor, oversugared demographic you. You're filling your apartments, your bodies, and your minds with useless junk. You stagger under your own weight, throwing money in random directions until you collapse and die, buried by a bunch of people who you fa
it does not validate[1] -- you've got 2 typos:
h ttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashcode.com%2Fslashdot.css&userm edium=all
line 242: "#adminfooter label , #adminfooter legend,{". remove the comma
at the end of the selector, and then line 488: "#usermenu ul.menu
a.end... padding: 5px 11px 0 0 2px;". you've got 5 values for the
padding property. it only takes 4 (for top, right, bottom and left,
respectively).
other suggestions:
- use descriptive names for classes. i'm seeing things like: #misc,
#frame and it's hard to remember what you're styling when you've
labelled it in a rush and just given it a placeholder for a name. other
class names are bound to locations (like #topnav) which is meta-semantic
rather than semantic and confusing since it's easy enough to decide to
css position it elsewhere and then you're going to have to change the
code again. (the point of css is to separate content from
presentation, so take the presentation out of your class names/ids and
leave it up to the css properties.) also, there are known quirk issues
with underscores in class names, eg your: #index_qlinks-content. rather
use hypens.
- for screen media, use a default font of sans-serif (you're using
serif). sans-serif is proven easier on the eye on low resolution devices
(like your monitor).
- when specifying a colour, you're encouraged to always provide both
foreground and background colours in the same css rule, as it's often
not obvious what the cascade will do and you can easily end up with
illegible text. for example, at least replace your:
a { color: #066; }
with:
a { color: #066; background-color: inherit; }
- you're using a mixture of css unit measurements. if you want text to
resize and print easier, try replacing the pixel (px) measurements with
ems or percentages (aka fluid layout). or provide a print stylesheet.
- i'm not sure on this[2], but apparently most elements do not have
intrinsic width and when you float something you should give it a width
even if it's just a width:auto.
- p
--
1.
W3C CSS Validator results for http://www.slashcode.com/slashdot.css
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=
2.
Visual formatting model
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#floats
A comparison of unpatched known vulnerabilities[1] in latest public version browsers (by securityfocus), ranks firefox as 8/9th:
Browser: Number of known vulnerabilities
so although they are making security a priority, it looks like they're not a "key" leader.
- p
--
...not at good as the original (imho). it put me off trying his next book "market forces". the original (altered carbon) was unadulterated -- perhaps so because it was his first novel.
my distant opinion is that the movie rights he sold (for usd 1m) may have effected his edge.
- p
south africa just (2004-07-15) had a ruling on a similar case: the 3x internet speed increase tv ad. it was upheld by the "self-regulating" advertising standards authority (asa).
.
i'm skeptical about the ruling. no publicly available references are cited, and it amounts to the word of the appellant (tim dowson) versus 20+ local industries underpinning the asa.
as my rule of thumb, when the claim sounds like a common spam subject line, you'll will ping my bogometer
- p
The fact is that if you want better pictures, you NEED to go through all of those "useless" features and change them.
i was once in a walmart looking at the digital cameras. only one model was sold out, and from the display pictures i could see it was the *only* model which had but a single button on top...
jef raskin (creator of the macintosh) argues (in "the humane interface) that although devices may necessarily become more complex to handle more complex cases, it should still remain possible to do simple tasks simply.
spell checking, and calculations are points he also raises. it's easier to reach for my desk calculator than try add two numbers together with the computer.
if a natural mappings were used more often, nobody would have trouble setting their vcr time either. (he gives a solution to this in chapter 1, if i recall right!)
- p
Wich is a behaviour that makes it really annoying,
it's annoying because it makes it harder to form a habit. this kind of thing (habituation) is an important part of cognitive science -- which is a vastly overlooked discipline.
if you're interested, i can recommend jef raskin's (yes, the creator of the macintosh) book _the humane interface_.
- p
what exactly does it take to crash Mozilla these days?
recommending mozilla as a more standards compliant browser can be tricky when it introduces it's own browser specific html elements: parsererror and sourcetext.
either element crashes ALL version of mozilla 1.x
see the source for yourself, or my previous post for the bugzilla reference.
- p
Time to give some of the other players a try, methinks...
:)
try xmplay (win32, 297kb). it's under active development (ian is really responsive to user requests/bug reports) and supports:
- ogg, mp3, mp2, mp1, wma, wav, mo3 (ogg or mp3 compressed module music), it, xm, s3m, mtm, mod, umx, and sid (via an input plugin)
- skinnable
- html url scanning
for the linux crew, try it's alpha xmms plugin.
- p