Calling opponents of what MS is doing "academic eggheads" is extremely short sighted. The opponents of this care about the web and it's infrastructure as a whole (including browser developers) rather than just a bunch of badly hacked up user agent sniffing sites they have to maintain.
If you think user agent sniffing is the only way to do your job then I would question how you could call yourself a professional web developer.
Going down the path MS is creating by adding new rendering modes will only end in madness as every webdesigner has to specify what browser version that site is to be rendered with. When there was only quirks mode and standards mode, most people didn't see that as a problem even if the "academic eggheads" did. But will it become a problem when browsers need to support 5 different IE rendering modes, 3 different Firefox rendering modes, 2 different Opera rendering modes etc etc? Or does only MS get the privilege of writing buggy browsers that every other browser writer have to emulate?
Effectively there won't be any web standards once you get to that point - web sites will end up just be coded to one of a dozen different rendering engines. That sets back all the hard won recent progress that has been made with promoting web standards. As only MS will have the clout to make everyone follow their rendering bugs, that puts MS back in charge of browser innovation (or lack thereof) as the other browsers end up chasing their tail in an eternal Samba like reverse engineering effort. How is that good for the web as a whole? Everyone ends up with buggier bloated browsers that are harder to maintain by their developers.
All this just because some webdesigners were too lazy to figure out how to do their jobs properly, and too shortsighted to see the bigger picture of what is at stake. This isn't MS getting out of the problem they created, it is MS perpetuating it even though they have finally created a standards compliant browser. Quirks modes should be opt-in rather than opt-out, and the aim should be to eventually leave them behind rather than lock them in place forever.
Quoting another comment: MS desire to "not break the web" really means "not fix the web". Every other new IE version has done similar things before - why is it now a problem?
Forgive me if I'm wrong (as I'm not an HTML guru in the least) but isn't that the point of DOCTYPE? Meaning, if a broken page wants to use the buggy renderer they shouldn't be setting a strict DOCTYPE.
Only in a very roundabout way. The actual point of the doctype isn't anything to do with rendering engines - it is how you specify exactly which version of HTML/XHTML/(some other random XML language) etc your markup should validate against.
In terms of rendering engines, CSS doesn't (unlike HTML) have any way of defining which version you are using anyway. The different versions just kinda build on each other, and browsers are supposed to ignore anything they don't understand.
What happened was that when browser makers needed to diverge their rendering engines into quirks mode and standards compliant mode, they figured it was a reasonable assumption that any site that uses a strict doctype is going to the trouble of complying with the standards. So they used the presence of certain doctypes to switch to standards mode. And now that (pragmatic but short sighted) approach is starting to show its warts.
None of this was originally intended by the standards writers - ie people writing standards sort of assume that they are intended to be complied with. So the standards (I think HTML5 might be an exception) don't really allow for providing configurable levels of brokenness in a well thought out extensible way. Actually being able to configure how broken your code is seems a bit strange anyway.
I don't know about that. I'm something of a serious DNA fan, and when the radio show was on I always pictured Marvin as short with a big head, just like the one that was in the H2G2 movie.
I always imagined Marvin to look a bit like Twiki but more depressed and not as low budget.
I won't say you are wrong, just that your interpretation of whether PHP includes are derivative works or not differs from the FSF.
Recently there was a big debate about this in the Drupal dev community after one of the developers sought an opinion from the FSF on this matter. Basically any PHP code that is included into Drupal (eg modules, themes, the settings file etc) becomes a derivative work of Drupal (which is GPLed). It was something to do with PHP includes ending up being part of the same memory space as the including code or something as they can directly call functions in the including app (I lost track myself).
So if Drupal was relicensed under the AGPL (extremely unlikely), an AGPLed Drupal using webmaster would need to supply their config file containing their database connection string to their site visitors:)
Yeah now that you mention it, Red Hat 5.1 was the first Linux distro (or *nix of any kind for that matter) I'd ever tried. It wasn't that long before I decided I preferred Debian Slink and OpenBSD 2.6 though:)
This is what I don't "get." Don't you need a hole in the OS before the hypervisor can be attacked? i.e. Suppose I have non-root access on an OpenBSD DomU. Don't I need to escalate my privs on OpenBSD, before I can even start to attack Xen?
Or looking at it another way - that OpenBSD guests total security is nothing to do with the security of OpenBSD itself, it is the combined security of Xen/VMware and the weakest guest OS on the machine. So your OpenBSDs security has been reduced by some amount (assuming it isn't already the weakest guest on the machine).
In the eyes of OpenBSD developers, mathematically as the likelihood curve of any other guest being compromised approaches a certainty it leaves Xen/VMware as effectively the only layer of defence against the OpenBSD guest getting compromised. As they know how hard it is to write a secure virtualisation layer on x86 hardware, they don't have much faith in having Xen/VMware as their only layer of defence.
And it isn't as though Xen or VMware haven't had security advisories already.
That said, I do like using Xen for Linux servers, but I'm not deluding myself into thinking it is for security.
Just seems he tries hard to have his name in lights.
How so? Some idiot on the OpenBSD mailing list gets into an argument with a bunch of people that know way more than he does, then this counts as Theo "trying hard to get his name in lights"?
I sounds more like posting a Theo flame is a guaranteed way to get a Slashdot story - just like critising Apple or Linux on a tech site intentionally drives ad traffic. It's just trolling.
If the "3rd person" cared about their freedom to modify and redistribute the source, why would they get their software from a "2nd person" who was denying them that freedom?
Surely a freedom loving "3rd person" would get the code from either the "1st person" or a freedom loving "2nd person" instead?
This is why I find the FSF a bit patronising - trying to enforce freedoms on those that don't want them just seems a little too much to me.
I would prefer that the ongoing freedom aspects were handled by education and that licenses for allowing modification and redistribution were kept simple and straight forward with as few side effects as possible. While the spirit of the GPL is relatively straight forward, the reality of how it works isn't and it shouldn't need endless debates and law professors constantly trying to clarify it.
Being selfish and not sharing is a social problem not a legal or technical problem IMO. As geeks we appreciate simplicity, reusability and elegance in our code, so why don't we all appreciate it in our licenses as well?
The air force's mothballed Skyhawk fighter jets have been offered for sale to the highest bidder on the TradeMe auction site.
In a spoof on the Government's inability to sell the 17 jets, they were offered for sale on the TradeMe website today and within 40 minutes bids had gone from $880 to $1510.
The seller said they would prefer an overseas buyer but invited local buyers to bid if they had the room.
They had all been upgraded since Vietnam and the new owner had to pay for shipping and delivery charges.
One browser wanted to know if they had a current warrant of fitness and another asked when they had had a 100-hour check.
Yet another asked if they came with a full tank of gas.
Another asked if they would get to Australia and back with a load of bombs.
"Well actually the bombs wouldn't be coming back."
The 17 Skyhawks were decomissioned in 2001 and later sold by the Government for $155 million to an American company.
The sale has yet to be approved by the US State Department and the aircraft are still in storage at Woodbourne air base in Blenheim.
I'm sure Microsoft is at fault though for not inventing the technology to make its 2002-vintage install CD's update themselves to include SATA support.
No but they are at fault for not providing access to alternate media you could load storage drivers from - eg CDs, USB keys etc. Instead XP still has this NT 3.5 era (or even earlier) installer that requires a floppy even at a time when it was plain the writing was on the wall for floppies.
I am leaning towards python and a python framework, but I am not happy about the deployment and configuration issues associated with python.
There is nothing about Python web frameworks that is inherently difficult to deploy or configure. If anything they seem to be similar or even easier than Rails or Java web frameworks.
But if you are coming from a PHP perspective it can seem harder. But that is really more to do with the ubiquity and popularity of PHP has artificially made it seem easier than the others. The web hosting world puts a lot more effort into supporting PHP than anything else - in fact it almost ignores everything else. If you want shared hosting for Ruby, Python, Java,.NET etc you really need to go to a specialist provider for those platforms.
The lowest common denominator deployment/configuration requirements are easier with PHP, but once you start getting into more complex configurations the gap between PHP and more professional platforms gets a lot smaller.
For those that don't know the functionality of svnmerge will be part of the upcoming subversion 1.5.
I think most criticism of svn comes from thinking that ALL it ever intended doing was to reimplement CVS in a better way. That was kinda the 1.0 goal - things have been moving on since. The svn developers have been discussing ways of making it a bit more "distributed" or able to work better in a decentralised manner.
And as you say, when subversion is "good enough" for someone the good cross platform support, wide support from 3rd party tools, friendly easy to understand interfaces for version control newbies and Windows users etc etc make it a good choice overall. It has successfully brought open source tools (often dragging Apache with it) into previously MS only development shops and displaced a lot of VSS installations. It has opened the eyes of a lot of Windows developers to the world of open source.
What then is the reaction to the lifting force? Remember all forces require an equal and opposite reaction - Newtons laws still apply at this scale.
The lift (due to pressure differences etc) needs a reaction force (required by Newton). You can't have one without the other. You can calculate the lift of a wing using lift coefficients, air density, velocity etc and lo and behold that force will be balanced by the mass x acceleration of the downward airflow. You can't have one without the other - the lift has to "push" against something.
You can't claim that significant amounts of air aren't directed downwards behind wings. Have you seen wingtip vortices in cloud? Could a helicopter hover without a downdraft? The wingtips vortices have an overall downward movement - planes can't fly without them.
just my semi informed impression here - corrections welcome, but I think you're focusing on how the lift is created (Bernoulli) rather than what it needs to do to allow something heavier than air to fly (Newton).
Isn't the end result of lift that air is forced downwards? After all how do you satisfy Newtons laws without that?
If you look at planes flying through clouds or smoke there is a lot of air redirected downwards behind wings. A hovering helicopter produces a strong downdraft. The equal and opposite reaction of lift requires accelerating air downwards.
Sure Bernoulli and other fluid dynamics research explains how a lower pressure zone with faster airflow forms above wings, but for that lower pressure to pull a wing upwards (ie lift) air needs to be pushed downwards. I was under the impression that the air leaving the top surface has larger downward velocity component than the air leaving the bottom surface hence an overall downward result.
So overall for heavier than air flight you need to accelerate something downwards (Newton) - Bernoulli describes how changes in cross section of a flow can change its pressure and velocity leading to lift. From Newtons point of view it makes no difference what is pushed downwards - eg a rocket still flies even if it isn't using aerodynamic lift.
eg: for me "hate" is the feeling itself not the intensity of that feeling. eg in my mind I can still say that I hate brussels sprouts or soap operas, even if they pale into insignificance compared to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot etc.
I think in recent years the words meaning has been shifted somewhat by being used as a scaremongering adjective eg hate mail, hate group, hate crime etc.
The "rules" are stupid. Do you know how hard it is to make a 3-column or 4-column content site using CSS 1.0? Is it even possible? Yet I can "break" the rules, use table cells as layout, and accomplish the same thing in seconds.
If an HTML table can do what you want, then the CSS spec isn't your problem - Internet Explorer is. For 9 years now the CSS 2 spec has contained functionality to display arbitrary HTML elements as tables, rows, cells etc.
<html>
<head>
<style>
div { display: table;
width: 50%;
border: 1px solid;
border-collapse: separate;
border-spacing: 1em; }
p { display: table-cell;
border: 1px solid;
padding: 1em; } </style>
</head>
<body>
<div> <!-- the div is only here to indicate the width and borders -->
<p>The "rules" are stupid. Do you know how hard it is to make a 3-column or
4-column content site using CSS 1.0?</p>
<p>The "rules" are stupid. Do you know how hard it is to make a 3-column or
4-column content site using CSS 1.0? Is it even possible? Yet I can "break"
the rules, use table cells as layout, and accomplish the same thing in seconds.</p>
<p>Is it even possible?</p>
<p>Yet I can "break"
the rules, use table cells as layout, and accomplish the same thing in seconds.</p>
</div>
</body> </html>
Don't blame the CSS spec for the limitations of Internet Explorer.
For instance, CSS 1.0 had no (official) way of creating columns, and creating layouts with more than 2 columns was particularly difficult/complex. WTF! Nobody who worked on that standard had ever looked at a newspaper before? None of them had ever seen a news website before? It seems to me (a practical person) that if you're going to make a web standard to replace table layouts you should first figure out what people were using the table layouts for (columns mostly!) and provide the same functionality.
CSS 1.0 had very little to do with layout and was actually quite a simple spec. Its main goal was text styling (ie banishing the FONT element etc). There wasn't any complex layout happening back then anyway. CSS 2.0 introduced a more complete layout system nearly 10 years (and many generations of browsers) ago, but there is still a lot of useful layout functionality in there I'd like to see implemented in most browsers (IE mainly, but the others still have the odd issue here and there).
But, hey, what do I know? I'm just the poor sucker trying to get web pages to actually work, when JScript and Javascript have totally different ways of doing mundane things for no reason. e.g. textContent vs. innerText-- hey Firefox, 'innerText' matches 'innerHTML', why did you implement the exact same function with a worse name? Not that Javascript/JScript has any naming conventions whatsoever anyway... WTF is "XMLHttpRequest?" The naming rule is "the first acronym is capitalized but the second one isn't?" Forgetting the fact that the function has absolutely nothing to do with XML whatsoever. Go figure.
I hate web standards.
Ummm none of that stuff you claim to hate is "web standards" it's all vendor specific stuff. Do you really think that web development would be in better shape than it currently is if there were less standards in place?
Prior to 1967 Palestine had zero sovereignity. The region was under the control of Egypt and Jordan. When those two stupid gits attacked Isreal, Isreal kicked their asses and took over the area now known as Palestine.
In terms of who attacked who I think you're thinking of 1973 - in 1967 it was Israel that attacked Egypt and Jordan etc.
If XP struggles in this comparison with that hardware, it's just as well (for XPs sake) they didn't use the 5+ yr old stuff that was new when XP came out.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling opponents of what MS is doing "academic eggheads" is extremely short sighted. The opponents of this care about the web and it's infrastructure as a whole (including browser developers) rather than just a bunch of badly hacked up user agent sniffing sites they have to maintain.
If you think user agent sniffing is the only way to do your job then I would question how you could call yourself a professional web developer.
Going down the path MS is creating by adding new rendering modes will only end in madness as every webdesigner has to specify what browser version that site is to be rendered with. When there was only quirks mode and standards mode, most people didn't see that as a problem even if the "academic eggheads" did. But will it become a problem when browsers need to support 5 different IE rendering modes, 3 different Firefox rendering modes, 2 different Opera rendering modes etc etc? Or does only MS get the privilege of writing buggy browsers that every other browser writer have to emulate?
Effectively there won't be any web standards once you get to that point - web sites will end up just be coded to one of a dozen different rendering engines. That sets back all the hard won recent progress that has been made with promoting web standards. As only MS will have the clout to make everyone follow their rendering bugs, that puts MS back in charge of browser innovation (or lack thereof) as the other browsers end up chasing their tail in an eternal Samba like reverse engineering effort. How is that good for the web as a whole? Everyone ends up with buggier bloated browsers that are harder to maintain by their developers.
All this just because some webdesigners were too lazy to figure out how to do their jobs properly, and too shortsighted to see the bigger picture of what is at stake. This isn't MS getting out of the problem they created, it is MS perpetuating it even though they have finally created a standards compliant browser. Quirks modes should be opt-in rather than opt-out, and the aim should be to eventually leave them behind rather than lock them in place forever.
Quoting another comment: MS desire to "not break the web" really means "not fix the web". Every other new IE version has done similar things before - why is it now a problem?
Only in a very roundabout way. The actual point of the doctype isn't anything to do with rendering engines - it is how you specify exactly which version of HTML/XHTML/(some other random XML language) etc your markup should validate against.
In terms of rendering engines, CSS doesn't (unlike HTML) have any way of defining which version you are using anyway. The different versions just kinda build on each other, and browsers are supposed to ignore anything they don't understand.
What happened was that when browser makers needed to diverge their rendering engines into quirks mode and standards compliant mode, they figured it was a reasonable assumption that any site that uses a strict doctype is going to the trouble of complying with the standards. So they used the presence of certain doctypes to switch to standards mode. And now that (pragmatic but short sighted) approach is starting to show its warts.
None of this was originally intended by the standards writers - ie people writing standards sort of assume that they are intended to be complied with. So the standards (I think HTML5 might be an exception) don't really allow for providing configurable levels of brokenness in a well thought out extensible way. Actually being able to configure how broken your code is seems a bit strange anyway.
I always imagined Marvin to look a bit like Twiki but more depressed and not as low budget.
The TV show Marvin was just plain wrong
Phew - I'm so glad I live in a country with 50Hz power! I sure dodged that cyclotronic resonance bullet.
I won't say you are wrong, just that your interpretation of whether PHP includes are derivative works or not differs from the FSF.
:)
Recently there was a big debate about this in the Drupal dev community after one of the developers sought an opinion from the FSF on this matter. Basically any PHP code that is included into Drupal (eg modules, themes, the settings file etc) becomes a derivative work of Drupal (which is GPLed). It was something to do with PHP includes ending up being part of the same memory space as the including code or something as they can directly call functions in the including app (I lost track myself).
So if Drupal was relicensed under the AGPL (extremely unlikely), an AGPLed Drupal using webmaster would need to supply their config file containing their database connection string to their site visitors
Yeah now that you mention it, Red Hat 5.1 was the first Linux distro (or *nix of any kind for that matter) I'd ever tried. It wasn't that long before I decided I preferred Debian Slink and OpenBSD 2.6 though :)
Or looking at it another way - that OpenBSD guests total security is nothing to do with the security of OpenBSD itself, it is the combined security of Xen/VMware and the weakest guest OS on the machine. So your OpenBSDs security has been reduced by some amount (assuming it isn't already the weakest guest on the machine).
In the eyes of OpenBSD developers, mathematically as the likelihood curve of any other guest being compromised approaches a certainty it leaves Xen/VMware as effectively the only layer of defence against the OpenBSD guest getting compromised. As they know how hard it is to write a secure virtualisation layer on x86 hardware, they don't have much faith in having Xen/VMware as their only layer of defence.
And it isn't as though Xen or VMware haven't had security advisories already.
That said, I do like using Xen for Linux servers, but I'm not deluding myself into thinking it is for security.
How so? Some idiot on the OpenBSD mailing list gets into an argument with a bunch of people that know way more than he does, then this counts as Theo "trying hard to get his name in lights"?
I sounds more like posting a Theo flame is a guaranteed way to get a Slashdot story - just like critising Apple or Linux on a tech site intentionally drives ad traffic. It's just trolling.
If the "3rd person" cared about their freedom to modify and redistribute the source, why would they get their software from a "2nd person" who was denying them that freedom?
Surely a freedom loving "3rd person" would get the code from either the "1st person" or a freedom loving "2nd person" instead?
This is why I find the FSF a bit patronising - trying to enforce freedoms on those that don't want them just seems a little too much to me.
I would prefer that the ongoing freedom aspects were handled by education and that licenses for allowing modification and redistribution were kept simple and straight forward with as few side effects as possible. While the spirit of the GPL is relatively straight forward, the reality of how it works isn't and it shouldn't need endless debates and law professors constantly trying to clarify it.
Being selfish and not sharing is a social problem not a legal or technical problem IMO. As geeks we appreciate simplicity, reusability and elegance in our code, so why don't we all appreciate it in our licenses as well?
Australian intelligence obviously monitor online auctions:
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/070919/3/1qbj.html
Article text:
No but they are at fault for not providing access to alternate media you could load storage drivers from - eg CDs, USB keys etc. Instead XP still has this NT 3.5 era (or even earlier) installer that requires a floppy even at a time when it was plain the writing was on the wall for floppies.
There is nothing about Python web frameworks that is inherently difficult to deploy or configure. If anything they seem to be similar or even easier than Rails or Java web frameworks.
But if you are coming from a PHP perspective it can seem harder. But that is really more to do with the ubiquity and popularity of PHP has artificially made it seem easier than the others. The web hosting world puts a lot more effort into supporting PHP than anything else - in fact it almost ignores everything else. If you want shared hosting for Ruby, Python, Java,
The lowest common denominator deployment/configuration requirements are easier with PHP, but once you start getting into more complex configurations the gap between PHP and more professional platforms gets a lot smaller.
For those that don't know the functionality of svnmerge will be part of the upcoming subversion 1.5.
I think most criticism of svn comes from thinking that ALL it ever intended doing was to reimplement CVS in a better way. That was kinda the 1.0 goal - things have been moving on since. The svn developers have been discussing ways of making it a bit more "distributed" or able to work better in a decentralised manner.
And as you say, when subversion is "good enough" for someone the good cross platform support, wide support from 3rd party tools, friendly easy to understand interfaces for version control newbies and Windows users etc etc make it a good choice overall. It has successfully brought open source tools (often dragging Apache with it) into previously MS only development shops and displaced a lot of VSS installations. It has opened the eyes of a lot of Windows developers to the world of open source.
What then is the reaction to the lifting force? Remember all forces require an equal and opposite reaction - Newtons laws still apply at this scale.
c ulation-vortices
s istent
The lift (due to pressure differences etc) needs a reaction force (required by Newton). You can't have one without the other. You can calculate the lift of a wing using lift coefficients, air density, velocity etc and lo and behold that force will be balanced by the mass x acceleration of the downward airflow. You can't have one without the other - the lift has to "push" against something.
You can't claim that significant amounts of air aren't directed downwards behind wings. Have you seen wingtip vortices in cloud? Could a helicopter hover without a downdraft? The wingtips vortices have an overall downward movement - planes can't fly without them.
http://www.av8n.com/irro/profilo1_e.html
http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/airfoils.html#sec-cir
http://amasci.com/wing/whyhard.html
http://www.diam.unige.it/~irro/gallery.html
There is no one single effect that causes a wing to produce lift - it is a combination of interrelated effects:
http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/airfoils.html#sec-con
just my semi informed impression here - corrections welcome, but I think you're focusing on how the lift is created (Bernoulli) rather than what it needs to do to allow something heavier than air to fly (Newton).
Isn't the end result of lift that air is forced downwards? After all how do you satisfy Newtons laws without that?
If you look at planes flying through clouds or smoke there is a lot of air redirected downwards behind wings. A hovering helicopter produces a strong downdraft. The equal and opposite reaction of lift requires accelerating air downwards.
Sure Bernoulli and other fluid dynamics research explains how a lower pressure zone with faster airflow forms above wings, but for that lower pressure to pull a wing upwards (ie lift) air needs to be pushed downwards. I was under the impression that the air leaving the top surface has larger downward velocity component than the air leaving the bottom surface hence an overall downward result.
So overall for heavier than air flight you need to accelerate something downwards (Newton) - Bernoulli describes how changes in cross section of a flow can change its pressure and velocity leading to lift. From Newtons point of view it makes no difference what is pushed downwards - eg a rocket still flies even if it isn't using aerodynamic lift.
I was thinking more of Hactar :)
I seem to remember something about Rowan Atkinson (ie Blackadder etc) having an electrical engineering degree...
I suppose that is subjective...
eg: for me "hate" is the feeling itself not the intensity of that feeling. eg in my mind I can still say that I hate brussels sprouts or soap operas, even if they pale into insignificance compared to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot etc.
I think in recent years the words meaning has been shifted somewhat by being used as a scaremongering adjective eg hate mail, hate group, hate crime etc.
If an HTML table can do what you want, then the CSS spec isn't your problem - Internet Explorer is. For 9 years now the CSS 2 spec has contained functionality to display arbitrary HTML elements as tables, rows, cells etc.
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#display-p
Just for a laugh try this in Firefox: Don't blame the CSS spec for the limitations of Internet Explorer.
CSS 1.0 had very little to do with layout and was actually quite a simple spec. Its main goal was text styling (ie banishing the FONT element etc). There wasn't any complex layout happening back then anyway. CSS 2.0 introduced a more complete layout system nearly 10 years (and many generations of browsers) ago, but there is still a lot of useful layout functionality in there I'd like to see implemented in most browsers (IE mainly, but the others still have the odd issue here and there).
Ummm none of that stuff you claim to hate is "web standards" it's all vendor specific stuff. Do you really think that web development would be in better shape than it currently is if there were less standards in place?
Of course, just look at how successful those tactics were for the Russians in Chechnya.
One foot should be enough for anybody - not Bill Gates.
That's stupid. If we require perfection before being able to point out bad stuff - nobody would be able to speak out at all. Or is that what you want?
In terms of who attacked who I think you're thinking of 1973 - in 1967 it was Israel that attacked Egypt and Jordan etc.
If XP struggles in this comparison with that hardware, it's just as well (for XPs sake) they didn't use the 5+ yr old stuff that was new when XP came out.