You're right, but at least the winter version is slightly more exciting than the summer one. At least for some of the athletes - ie skiing, snowboarding, luge etc.
I suppose if you don't want lossy compression, layers, and think that 1bit palette based transparency is good enough, don't mind the licensing - then yes gif would be ok.
In the fast dinghy/sailboard arena, this could sell *because* it's new and unusual.
I disagree. The windsurfing market has been subjected to so many fads over the years (especially during the 80's - ie when lots of other things were dayglo pink!) that they are pretty resistant to 'out there' ideas like this.
It always comes back to the simplest, cleanest shapes and ideas. Now developments are all evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and progress is being made much faster that way.
Most windsurfers wouldn't buy this unless it had proved itself in competition for a year or two.
Then again, how to they expect the boat version to work?
A sailboard does lean the rig into the wind and pulls down on it to take the sailors weight off the board.
But a sailboat leans away from the wind - does that mean that the wing would get stretched upwards thus making it less and less suited to strong winds as the wind increases.
That isn't a particularly compelling argument without seeing it in the reference renderer (athena).
I assume you mean Amaya? I've found that to be extremely buggy, and not much use even as a reference (it seems to do MathML quite well though). You can't blame it though, look how much effort Mozilla has gone to to comply with the standards. I think the specs have outgrown W3s ability to code reference implementations.
Compare the page I linked to in Amaya and Mozilla. The page was created by W3.org after all. You can't tell me that the way Amaya shows it is anywhere near correct while Mozilla is incorrect;-)
Even IE does a way better job than Amaya!
I agree with your comparison of the platforms security, but I don't think the article was genuine FUD. More like imprecise or lazy journalism.
They aren't trying to imply Linux and Solaris are as vulnerable as Windows, just listing some other worms that gained press coverage lately. The Lion and Ramen worms got a fair amount of coverage and probably deserve a place in the top 5 or so recent worms even if they were nowhere near the damage caused by Nimda or Code Red. What I'm trying to say is that I think Lion and Ramen probably rate higher in the press than the next in line Windows worms (I don't even know what they would be - I'm not including the Outlook worms in this server platform assessment).
Mozilla is actually one of the few browser that can properly render css2, and IE isn't one of them.
Agree 100%. Trying to do any CCS2 in IE (IE6 hasn't improved much) seems to bring out homicidal urges in me.
Admittedly CCS2 isn't that necessary for general websites, but I work on a lot of intranet applications that need more of those features to help seperate out the presentation from the code and avoid tons of nested fixed width tables. Plus coding to HTML Strict just seems 'right' somehow.
Just for the record... before shooting your mouth off, check out the latest version of IE6.
I have, and it isn't anywhere near compliant with CSS2 (CSS1 is fine - but how old is that!?!). Mozilla absolutely walks all over IE6 in standards compliance. Compare this page in both IE and Mozilla to see what I mean.
About 18 months ago, I was working on a intranet app that used some CSS2 for stretchy resizable menus with graphics and resizable text in them (the client didn't want fixed widths). I cursed the developers of Netscape 4.x loudly for their broken implementation of CSS, but being an intranet app we could ignore it. Getting IE5 to work was doable but a few hoops needed jumping through to work around things it wouldn't do, and IE4 was a lot harder but we ended up getting it to work. Of course this code wouldn't work properly in either Mozilla, Opera or Konqueror (all 3 other browsers displayed it the same way though).
Now we have been hired to update the look and feel and we would like to make it a little more cross browser compatible. I find myself cursing IE loudly this time. First attempts at making something based on what the CSS2 standard says will work in Mozilla first time, while IE will need many tweaks to get it to kinda work and these tweaks will end up breaking how it looks in Mozilla and Opera.
The worst thing is that MS hasn't really improved the CSS2 compliance since IE5. IE5.5 and 6.0 look just the same as IE5 - they still keep ignoring about half the style properties available (if not more).
People complain about websites using ugly hacks like tables for layout and spacer gifs etc - but it won't change until MS fully (or even almost fully) implements the standards and lets sites be written the right way.
Not quite, weren't the Lion and Ramen worms mentioned above actually Linux/Unix worms? Or at least Redhat specific ones. Yeah, I know Code Red and Nimda were worse (I'm not excusing MSs crap security), but all of those worms were helped spread by insecure default installs.
Redhat seems to have learnt with 7.1 onwards, and it looks like MS might finally be learning with their talk about IIS 6 defaults (Whether or not that actually happens is another matter of course! I'm not holding my breath).
Don't quote me on this, but I had some notion that the name OpenBSD came from after Theo broke away from NetBSD the new OpenBSD team wanted to make the dev process more 'open' and pioneered anonymous CVS for the entire codebase. The secure part came later, and the other BSDs have since used anonymous CVS as well.
Geez I'd be pissed if I couldn't play basketball with the others because some smartass set up a non MS web server.
If there's one thing MS has done well - it's looking after developers! While all the non MS developers are inside getting OOS, sore eyes and fat butts, the MS developers get regular exercise breaks in the sunshine.
I'm not sure how people get the idea that the building gets weaker as you get higher. How exactly does that work? There are two ways structural members carry more weight - either you increase the size (the usual way) or you change the material.
Multistorey buildings are designed with a generic floor that can be repeated all the way up the building. Engineers don't design each floor individually because it would take 50x as long to design and you end up with 50x as many construction drawings and 50x as many mistakes on site when building it. I don't know if anybody noticed, but apart from the bottom 10 or so floors every floor had the same concrete core and same steel columns (skin) on the outside. The the 20th floor is the same as the 90th floor. There were no internal columns - just beams and trusses that carry the weight of their floors and brace the external columns to the central core.
True, but since win2k doesn't have the equivalent of sudo or su, it can be a serious pain in the ass, especially for some luser who can't figure out why they can't do something unless they log out and log back in as admin, not a quick operation.
Not quite, W2K introduced the "Run as..." feature, and the NT Resource Kits have a su in them. Don't get me wrong, they're still a bit of a PITA to use and not as transparent as sudo (but sudo is a bit of a hack really). They are there though.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but will correct any incorrect MS bashing (don't worry, there's still plenty of other things to bash).
Check out my comment here for links to some fledgling open source groupware projects that are planning to interoperate between both the servers and clients.
The Open Office org people are working on that with the PHPGroupware people. Links are here (Check the mail archives), here and here. Keep in mind that the SO 5.2 groupware features couldn't be open sourced, so these guys are starting from scratch and a long way behind.
The PHPGroupware project has pretty much finished creating an open XML-RPC (and SOAP soon) groupware protocol specification and server implementation. The Open Office people plan on a quick port of the Mozilla calendar project to this protocol, and later on build a native Star Office groupware client. Hopefully the Evolution people will pull their heads out and start looking at this for the server back end.
The intention is that one day any groupware client that follows this protocol will talk to any groupware server, and give the ability to mix and match every layer of the solution. This would let you choose a web interface or an integrated client (eg Outlook/Evolution) or seperate mail and calendaring clients. And on the backend, choose your storage (eg filesystem or SQL database), choose you IMAP server, your directory, your iCal server etc etc.
It is ambitious, but a sorely needed to break the IT world out of MS lock-in. I'd love to see future groupware built on open standards rather than the proprietry Exchange/Notes/Groupwise ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Priceless
You're right, but at least the winter version is slightly more exciting than the summer one. At least for some of the athletes - ie skiing, snowboarding, luge etc.
Wasn't NT5 beta 1 more like september 97? By sept 99 W2K was RC3 if I remember right.
Ummm.... yes
I suppose if you don't want lossy compression, layers, and think that 1bit palette based transparency is good enough, don't mind the licensing - then yes gif would be ok.
;-)
One and a bit out of four wasn't bad was it?
You could, but they're not around anymore ;-)
In the fast dinghy/sailboard arena, this could sell *because* it's new and unusual.
I disagree. The windsurfing market has been subjected to so many fads over the years (especially during the 80's - ie when lots of other things were dayglo pink!) that they are pretty resistant to 'out there' ideas like this.
It always comes back to the simplest, cleanest shapes and ideas. Now developments are all evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and progress is being made much faster that way.
Most windsurfers wouldn't buy this unless it had proved itself in competition for a year or two.
Then again, how to they expect the boat version to work?
A sailboard does lean the rig into the wind and pulls down on it to take the sailors weight off the board.
But a sailboat leans away from the wind - does that mean that the wing would get stretched upwards thus making it less and less suited to strong winds as the wind increases.
Agreed. It can't be too long before someones kitemare ends up in the darwin awards.
One or two kites at the beach is fine, but a dozen or more can get pretty hairy.
That isn't a particularly compelling argument without seeing it in the reference renderer (athena).
;-)
I assume you mean Amaya? I've found that to be extremely buggy, and not much use even as a reference (it seems to do MathML quite well though). You can't blame it though, look how much effort Mozilla has gone to to comply with the standards. I think the specs have outgrown W3s ability to code reference implementations.
Compare the page I linked to in Amaya and Mozilla. The page was created by W3.org after all. You can't tell me that the way Amaya shows it is anywhere near correct while Mozilla is incorrect
Even IE does a way better job than Amaya!
I agree with your comparison of the platforms security, but I don't think the article was genuine FUD. More like imprecise or lazy journalism.
They aren't trying to imply Linux and Solaris are as vulnerable as Windows, just listing some other worms that gained press coverage lately. The Lion and Ramen worms got a fair amount of coverage and probably deserve a place in the top 5 or so recent worms even if they were nowhere near the damage caused by Nimda or Code Red. What I'm trying to say is that I think Lion and Ramen probably rate higher in the press than the next in line Windows worms (I don't even know what they would be - I'm not including the Outlook worms in this server platform assessment).
I hope my explanantion made sense.
Mozilla is actually one of the few browser that can properly render css2, and IE isn't one of them.
Agree 100%. Trying to do any CCS2 in IE (IE6 hasn't improved much) seems to bring out homicidal urges in me.
Admittedly CCS2 isn't that necessary for general websites, but I work on a lot of intranet applications that need more of those features to help seperate out the presentation from the code and avoid tons of nested fixed width tables. Plus coding to HTML Strict just seems 'right' somehow.
Just for the record... before shooting your mouth off, check out the latest version of IE6.
I have, and it isn't anywhere near compliant with CSS2 (CSS1 is fine - but how old is that!?!). Mozilla absolutely walks all over IE6 in standards compliance. Compare this page in both IE and Mozilla to see what I mean.
About 18 months ago, I was working on a intranet app that used some CSS2 for stretchy resizable menus with graphics and resizable text in them (the client didn't want fixed widths). I cursed the developers of Netscape 4.x loudly for their broken implementation of CSS, but being an intranet app we could ignore it. Getting IE5 to work was doable but a few hoops needed jumping through to work around things it wouldn't do, and IE4 was a lot harder but we ended up getting it to work. Of course this code wouldn't work properly in either Mozilla, Opera or Konqueror (all 3 other browsers displayed it the same way though).
Now we have been hired to update the look and feel and we would like to make it a little more cross browser compatible. I find myself cursing IE loudly this time. First attempts at making something based on what the CSS2 standard says will work in Mozilla first time, while IE will need many tweaks to get it to kinda work and these tweaks will end up breaking how it looks in Mozilla and Opera.
The worst thing is that MS hasn't really improved the CSS2 compliance since IE5. IE5.5 and 6.0 look just the same as IE5 - they still keep ignoring about half the style properties available (if not more).
People complain about websites using ugly hacks like tables for layout and spacer gifs etc - but it won't change until MS fully (or even almost fully) implements the standards and lets sites be written the right way.
Not quite, weren't the Lion and Ramen worms mentioned above actually Linux/Unix worms? Or at least Redhat specific ones. Yeah, I know Code Red and Nimda were worse (I'm not excusing MSs crap security), but all of those worms were helped spread by insecure default installs.
Redhat seems to have learnt with 7.1 onwards, and it looks like MS might finally be learning with their talk about IIS 6 defaults (Whether or not that actually happens is another matter of course! I'm not holding my breath).
I'm sure there's something in the Geneva Convention against stuff like that!
Isn't there also a Citrix XP as well?
That sounds like an April Fools ad Compaq placed in a local paper here a few years ago. I think the next year was their foot mouse to stop RSI.
Could the impetus just be to make it easier to make changes? Does it have to be bugs raging out of control?
;-)
Yeah but when they say it that way, it brings to mind a large lizard trampling Tokyo
Don't quote me on this, but I had some notion that the name OpenBSD came from after Theo broke away from NetBSD the new OpenBSD team wanted to make the dev process more 'open' and pioneered anonymous CVS for the entire codebase. The secure part came later, and the other BSDs have since used anonymous CVS as well.
Geez I'd be pissed if I couldn't play basketball with the others because some smartass set up a non MS web server.
If there's one thing MS has done well - it's looking after developers! While all the non MS developers are inside getting OOS, sore eyes and fat butts, the MS developers get regular exercise breaks in the sunshine.
Reinforced concrete gets more and more impractical for buildings over about 40 storeys though.
I'm not sure how people get the idea that the building gets weaker as you get higher. How exactly does that work? There are two ways structural members carry more weight - either you increase the size (the usual way) or you change the material.
Multistorey buildings are designed with a generic floor that can be repeated all the way up the building. Engineers don't design each floor individually because it would take 50x as long to design and you end up with 50x as many construction drawings and 50x as many mistakes on site when building it. I don't know if anybody noticed, but apart from the bottom 10 or so floors every floor had the same concrete core and same steel columns (skin) on the outside. The the 20th floor is the same as the 90th floor. There were no internal columns - just beams and trusses that carry the weight of their floors and brace the external columns to the central core.
True, but since win2k doesn't have the equivalent of sudo or su, it can be a serious pain in the ass, especially for some luser who can't figure out why they can't do something unless they log out and log back in as admin, not a quick operation.
Not quite, W2K introduced the "Run as..." feature, and the NT Resource Kits have a su in them.
Don't get me wrong, they're still a bit of a PITA to use and not as transparent as sudo (but sudo is a bit of a hack really). They are there though.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but will correct any incorrect MS bashing (don't worry, there's still plenty of other things to bash).
Check out my comment here for links to some fledgling open source groupware projects that are planning to interoperate between both the servers and clients.
The Open Office org people are working on that with the PHPGroupware people. Links are here (Check the mail archives), here and here. Keep in mind that the SO 5.2 groupware features couldn't be open sourced, so these guys are starting from scratch and a long way behind.
The PHPGroupware project has pretty much finished creating an open XML-RPC (and SOAP soon) groupware protocol specification and server implementation. The Open Office people plan on a quick port of the Mozilla calendar project to this protocol, and later on build a native Star Office groupware client. Hopefully the Evolution people will pull their heads out and start looking at this for the server back end.
The intention is that one day any groupware client that follows this protocol will talk to any groupware server, and give the ability to mix and match every layer of the solution. This would let you choose a web interface or an integrated client (eg Outlook/Evolution) or seperate mail and calendaring clients. And on the backend, choose your storage (eg filesystem or SQL database), choose you IMAP server, your directory, your iCal server etc etc.
It is ambitious, but a sorely needed to break the IT world out of MS lock-in. I'd love to see future groupware built on open standards rather than the proprietry Exchange/Notes/Groupwise ones.