Re:Oh? I can't run linux as root?
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Ever try doing that on a Windows machine?
For a while, I had my primary accout be a restricted user and was using Run As... to get adminstrator privileges for programs that needed that. After realizing that basically every single program I used required administrator rights, I gave up, and made my account an administrator account. (Most annoying was WinAmp - it turned out it required "Power User" privilege levels (or higher) to operate properly.)
(To be fair, I primarily use Windows for playing games, and most games for some stupid reason require you to be an administrator, including several of Microsoft's games. I don't really understand why - you can use DirectX as a normal user, and it isn't for the network portion. But the developers programmed them to check if you're an administrator and not run if you're not.)
The thing with Windows is that a ton of developers just assume that you'll be running as an administrator (probably because they're coming from writing for Windows 98 or the like), making it a real chore to be running Windows as anything but Administrator. Yeah, you can do it - but it rapidly becomes too much of a hassle to explain.
(Besides, who else thinks that even if you did teach people to run as non-admin and only use the admin account when needed, you'll still have users downloading trojan-program.exe and running it as admin when it tells them they have to? Maybe Microsoft should make it so that IE always runs as an unprivileged account.:))
I can't, in fact, think of any examples at all where a mistake that causes a 'leak' in Java is not also a leak in an equivalent program with explicit allocation.
Yeah, I agree. The issue comes up because a lot of developers hear "garbage collection" and think "memory leaks are impossible." Then they ignore things like removing objects from collections when they're done with them, and cause memory leaks in Java.
The point is that memory leaks are indeed possible in Java. Yes, it's because of bad coding practices - but honestly, that's really the cause of memory leaks in any program.
Far too many people assume that because Java is garbage collected it is somehow magically immune to memory leaks, and that simply isn't the case.
To clarify this, the issue usually comes up when something large is placed into a collection and then never removed because it's forgotten about. The collection still has a valid reference to the object, but nothing is ever going to reference it again. There's really no way for the GC to know that the fifth object in a linked list should have been removed ages ago since it will no longer be used. All Java memory leaks are variants on this issue.
The simplest way to do this is to add event listeners to objects, because most people consider those "throw-away" objects. You just chuck an event listener onto a button, for example, and forget about it. This generally works because usually you'll drop references to the button when you're done with it, so all the event listeners will become garbage too.
The problem comes in situtations where that object reference persists (for example, if you make only one copy of your "About" window, but accidently add new event handlers to it every time it is displayed). You wind up with a memory leak, since you keep using memory for these objects that you then no longer use. But a collection still contains them, somewhere, so the garbage collector can't collect them.
Java memory leaks are always caused by something, somewhere, containing a reference to something that it no longer should. This makes tracking them down incredibly hard, since you have to figure out what, where, has a reference to an object that should be considered dead. These reference are almost always abstracted away into a collection object somewhere, making them even less obvious. In C/C++ you can usually get away with freeing something you know will no longer be used even if something still has an invalid reference to it. (Although, obviously, you still should remove the reference.)
This isn't really a flaw with the Java system, though. It's a flaw that any GC system can have and is caused by people failing to recognize existing strong references to an object. Sun has a "solution" to this in the java.lang.ref.WeakReference class, which allows you to stick "weak references" to an object into collections. This is only a partial solution, though, since the WeakReference object itself takes memory (albiet a much smaller amount) and still needs to be removed from the collection.
Actually, if you View Source the HTML of the post, you'll note that he had the spacing done properly in the text box, but had the wrong text mode selected when it was posted.
Slashdot's text modes are kinda confusing, it's actually rather easy to mess up the text mode and screw up the formatting of your post. For example, "Plain Old Text" preserves the newlines in your post... but also allows you to enter in HTML, so you can do things like emphasise your words.
HTML formatted, on the other hand, allows HTML but does not "preserve" newlines. (Actually, it does - Plain Old Text adds "<br>" at each newline, HTML formatted does not.)
Then there's Extrans, which does what most people would expect Plain Old Text to do - it makes the newlines you enter appear in the final HTML, and also escapes any HTML tags within the text block.
(Man, I've been reading the Register too often, I have no idea why I used the British spelling of "emphasize" up there.)
Anyone else notice that the photo (that she presumably picked out herself) looks surprisingly like a certain Star Wars character? (Seriously - compare one to the other. It's uncanny!)
I have to wonder what on earth she was thinking when she chose that photo. She has better ones on her webpage... why choose that unless you want to be associated with Jabba?
Well... it depends on what you mean by "peer to peer." I've had plenty of times when I've needed to transfer a file between one computer to another. In some of those cases, I've used the P2P solution provided by AOL Instant Messenger. I some how doubt that's what most people think of when they say "P2P" but the "File transfer" mechanism used in AIM is a P2P application - the two peers communicate through the AOL IM servers to discover how to connect to each other and then the two peers connect directly to transfer a file.
The only other legitimate use of "public" P2P software I've ever seen has been BitTorrent. Unfortunately, BitTorrent is a massive bandwidth hog and is actively banned at both school and work. Plus Suprnova has effectively made BitTorrent's primary use to illegally download copyrighted material. (Not to mention other sites that offer illegal torrents.)
(Well, that's not completely true... I once had someone download the RedHat 9 ISOs through a P2P network. I'm not convinced they were aware what they were downloading, though, since grabbing them at 9kb/s is almost definitely slower than using RedHat's FTP site.)
Ultimately I'd like to see these illegal uses of P2P shut down while allowing legitimate P2P like the AOL IM example I've given. As people have often mentioned, P2P is not in and of itself illegal. But I've rarely seen it used legally.
Yeah... Look at her picture from her Blogger profile. Now I'm overweight too, so I can't really make too much fun, but I know she could have found a more flattering picture of herself than that.
I mildly curious as to why she'd post the ugliest picture of her off her personal web page as her Blogger profile pic. But, being a lawyer, I guess that preditorial "Jabba the Hutt" look is what she's going for.
McDonalds' current ad campaign. The thing is that I'm well aware that McDonalds exists... but I have no desire to eat there, because their food is crap.
"just do it."
It's familiar, but I don't know what it's for
Nike, of course. This one is often parodied, which might be why it sounds familiar. Yet again, I know the phrase, but I can't think of the last thing with a swoosh I've bought. I think it was a shirt some five or six years ago.
"takes a licking and keeps on ticking."
Ah, a blast from the past, when I was a small child watching TV: Timex. They don't really use that ad campaign anymore, I don't think.
Now that one I didn't know. And I wear a Timex watch. (Well, when I wear a watch at all.)
I wonder if there's a pattern here?:)
(Actually, probably not, since the watch was a gift. And I've actually bought McDonalds and Nike goods on occasion - just not recently.)
You know, maybe some CSS, use a sans-serif font, something like that...
(And, yeah, I can bearly read any of the link test in this beige color, it's practically invisible on my monitor, and this monitor has a rather nice contrast range too.)
It's a console app. You call it and it builds "stuff", much like Ant does. I don't really know much more than that right now, though, so no complicated questions please.:)
(Oh, and that "screenshot" is messed up, I had to add a "." to make sure it stayed indented properly, Slashdot messed it up otherwise.)
I'm fairly certain "iexplore.exe" is just a stub that launches "explorer.exe" on Windows XP systems. I think the two were distinct back in the Windows 95 days, but now they launch basically the same code.
As means of comparison, "firefox.exe" weighs in at 6.27MB on Windows, so it's fairly safe to assume that most of the Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer functionality is hidden away in miscellaneous libaries. (Like the ever-popular "mshtml.dll," which comes in a 2.66MB.)
As an example, I took the Explorer window I was using and checked the "About" dialog, it said "About Windows." I then entered "http://slashdot.org/" into the address bar, and rechecked the "About" dialog, and got "About Internet Explorer." I'm fairly certain that while there is an "iexplore.exe" file, all it does these days is launch "explorer.exe" with the options to make it act in "web browser" mode.
But I don't know about the logging out part. With XP, at least, you can just switch users and keep the other user's applications still running.
No you can't, if you disabled the Welcome screen. I got rid of the Welcome screen because I found it to be rather annoying, but disabling it for some unknown reasons prevents "fast user switching."
I mean, I suppose I could reenable it, but then I'd lose the ability to lock the computer such that you have to press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to log back on. I rather like this feature, since I live with something called "cats" which like to walk on the keyboard when I'm not around. With the "Lock Computer" screen up, nothing happens when they walk across the keyboard (well, the computer beeps), but they can't accidently log in to "Guest" or something.
Not to mention a ton of corporate users have the Welcome screen disabled for a variety of reasons.
As many people have mentioned, this bug was found two years ago.
Since Mozilla doesn't like people on Slashdot being able to trash-talk their browser by linking to bug reports, you'll have to copy the links to actually visit them, but:
2002-08-20 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163767 - root of all these bugs, Mozilla passes unknown protocols to Windows
2002-08-20 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163648 - same bug, spefically could launch IE and allow the execution of VBScript (possibly in the local security zone)
2002-10-03 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172498 - same bug, hcp: protocol could delete any file on your computer (wildcards allowed)
2002-10-07 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173010 - requested a whitelist to avoid future instances of the same bug
This bug has been known about for two years. It still hasn't been fixed. When SP2 adds the "delete:" protocol or similar, then Mozilla is going to be vulnerable to that, too. And it looks like the developers have decided not to bother fixing it.
This isn't a triumph of open source - it's an example of how open source falls prey to exactly the same problems closed source does. Except publically, so you can point to these discussions to demonstrate that they knew about the issues for two years.
Last time I posted a link in the comments, I got around 49% IE usage. Mozilla was around 19% at the time. That was in 2001.
Suffice it to say that while Internet Explorer use is fairly high on Slashdot, it's still used far less than average. I would expect Mozilla usage in Slashdot users to have increased since then.
What really makes me mad is they drove other browsers into the ground during the war, only to sit on their haunches and enjoy the elimination of their competition. Thank goodness for Mozilla, or we'd all be in real trouble.
Heh - that sounds like what Netscape did around Netscape 4. Remember that time? Netscape 4 came out in June 1997, and then sat there. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer 4 came out in October of the same year and totally blew Netscape 4 away, but was rarely used. Three years later, Netscape finally releases Netscape 6, but it was already too late for them.
Likewise, Internet Explorer 6 was released in October 2001, and it's now been three years...
(Except Firefox isn't that much better than Internet Explorer to totally dominate it, like IE was compared to Netscape 4. Yes, the bundling thing helped - but Netscape 4 really was that bad so that Internet Explorer 4+ was truly superior.)
The problem is that Opera includes the string "MSIE" in their default user agent to maintain some kind of compatibility with scripts searching for MSIE. However, due to the brain-dead way IE allows you to support PNGs with alpha, (namely, creating a blank space to place the image over), Opera won't display anything for the image. This, not surprisingly, isn't that desirable, since Opera supports PNGs perfectly.
Instead of checking for MSIE, I find it's best to check for the existance of the "filters" collection on an object since Opera doesn't support it and as far as I know no browser other than MSIE does. So what you basically do is pick an element that you know will have filters and then see if the filters collection on it is null. Due to the way JavaScript works with properties on elements, browsers that don't support filters will instead report that the "filters" property is null, and IE will report that it's a collection.
Yes, <ecode> is broken, so no indentation, but here goes:
if (document.body.filters == null) { // Not MSIE } else { // Is MSIE }
This script works to detect if you're using MSIE and doesn't get "fooled" by Opera.
You can see an example of where I used this script on my Final Fantasy XI Skillchains Tool - the page will display properly in Opera, MSIE, and Mozilla, with PNGs displaying alpha. (Note that I don't use the technique you use above, I actually replace the images during the onload event. Same basic idea.)
Oh, and while we're at it, the PNG rundown:
MSIE: Gamma broken when present, alpha broken
Mozilla: Perfect
Opera: Perfect
Konquerer: To the best of my knowledge, perfect
Safari: Gamma broken when absent
I went to see the third movie with co-workers as part of a "team-building" event. Sometime before the Zion fight we wound up deciding that the movie wasn't worth taking seriously and started heckling it amongst ourselves.
Someone pointed out the MagiTek armor, complete with hood-ornament pilot, during the Zion scenes.
And, of course, once we got to the final fight scene, I just looked at my co-workers and said "Dragon Ball Z." I waited for Neo as Goku to go Super Saiyan and was disappointed that he instead fused with Smith at the end and then defeated him from the inside.
I do have to credit the third Matrix movie, though: before watching it, I thought a live-action Dragon Ball Z movie might look cool. After watching it I realized that it would be just as tedious using live action as it is in the cartoon.
(Another ancedote about the third movie involves my sister asking me if it was supposed to be a comedy. She figured they had to be trying for something that bad.)
-Prior to 9/11, Bush had been on vacation over 40 percent of his time in office. During one of those vacations, he was given a security brief that outlined Osama bin Laden training his agents to fly planes in the US as tools of terror. Condi Rice talked about that memo in some of the investigations. Nothing was done about it.
Someone worked out the figures on this. 40% sounds, well, incredibly high. The only way they could match this figure was to count weekends - all of them. Given that there are 52 weekends in a year, some math gives us 28% of the year as being a weekend. So by simply not counting those dates we get a more reasonable 12%.
Now, obviously, the percentage probably should count weekends spent durning vacations, but I can't find a list of when Bush went on vacation, so I can't duplicate the research.
Besides, as Moore implies with that "received a memo about Osama bin Laden," it's not like Bush wasn't doing work while on those vacations - otherwise, why would he be reading a memo on vacation?
Actually, it looks like it was designed to work properly in Netscape 4 and MSIE. Unfortunately, for some asinine reason, Mozilla decided to ditch backwards compatibility for the old Netscape "layers" collection.
Half the pages that don't work out there are thanks to Mozilla dropping support for "layers" without offering any explanation for how to reobtain this functionality. (You do it by "getElementById()", as it turns out, which is in fact standards compliant and works on MSIE, Mozilla, and Opera, but a word of warning would have been nice. Like, say, a "Transitioning from Netscape 4 for Web Developers" document. But no... at least, not that I could ever find, and I looked.)
Basically, if Mozilla would be kind enough to either re-add support for "layers" or at the very least support MSIE's "all" collection (like Opera does), you'd find that suddenly a very large collection of web pages would magically start working with very little other changes required.
But, hey, the "all" collection wasn't invented by Mozilla and completely duplicates the "getElementById()" method, so who am I to expect them to actually go for compatibility with the web browser used by the vast majority of users.
Seriously, it looks like whoever designed that page was designed to work in both Netscape 4 and MSIE, but then Netscape broke backwards compatibility with their own browser, and now it doesn't. While all my new stuff supports Mozilla, MSIE, and Opera properly, my older stuff didn't for quite a while due to Mozilla removing the "layers" collection.
OK, I'm from Massachusetts, so this only applies to New England I guess.
In almost every restraunt if you ask for tea you'll get unsweetened hot tea, usually with cream and sugar available to be added if you wish. If you ask for iced tea you'll get unsweetened iced tea with a slice of lemon and sugar available to be added if you wish.
While coffee does reign as the "hot drink" here for the most part, you can usually get tea at any place that serves coffee. I'm fairly sure you can get hot tea at McDonalds and Burger King here - but I usually don't want tea with fast food (and, based on everything else there, the tea would be crap anyway), so I haven't tried recently. I suppose it could be an interesting experiment...
Most fast food restraunts here don't actually give you a filled cup any more. They give you an empty cup and have you swing by the soda fountain. I know they include a spigget for hot water. I'm fairly sure you can get a tea bag too.
My father is a tea drinker - I usually stick with soda or iced tea:) - so this is mostly based on times I've eaten out with him. (And, IMNSHO, sweetening tea ruins it. I prefer it without cream, too, but cream is OK. Adding sugar to coffee is also an abomination.)
Anyone else think this isn't so much a strength with the command-line app but a weakness with X?
I really would like to see that feature added to X. You can (sorta) do it with VNC or Remote Desktop in Windows (sorta means "entire desktop only, not a single app") - it would be really nice if you could take a GUI-based program running on some other computer and "forward" it to your own computer, without restarting the application.
IMO, that's a weakness of X - something that X should do, and not a strength of the console. They both should do it. As I'm sure everyone knows, screen is incredibly useful. Something like it for X would be really nice, too.
Your average consumer doesn't care much about copy-protected or not-copy-protected CDs and even if they have "this product does not conform to the CD standard" in big bold letters on the cover of the latest [CD] they will still buy it just because they have to own whatever it is that Brittany Spears puts out.
I don't know if it's so much "doesn't care" as "doesn't understand." I mean, what on earth does it mean that a CD doesn't conform to the CD standard?
Does that mean it has a larger than normal jewel case? Does it have a special poster placed in place of the usual little booklet at the beginning? Is the CD green instead of the standard silver color?
Of course, what such a label would really mean is that the CD doesn't follow the standard to ensure it plays in every CD player, but such a label could easily be confused or even be thought of as a good thing. ("Yeah, it doesn't conform to the CD standard - it's, like, going against the trend, or something, so it's cool.")
A useful label might be a warning that the disc may not play in all CD players. However, that will likely get blamed on the CD players and not the CD itself. I mean, it's just a CD - if the CD player can't play it, it must be because the CD player is too old or broken or something.
The real problem is education. Users really don't understand how a CD player works or why copyright protection harms thier ability to use what they are willing to pay for. (Like, say, how I can't play WarCraft III any more because it randomly decided I pirated it, which pisses me off since I wasted money on the "special edition." In fact, I can't play any Blizzard game on my computer, since whatever they use for copy protection flat out doesn't work on my machine. End result: I don't play Blizzard games.)
The companies claim that the problem is with the pirates or with the user's hardware. And who is your average user to disagree? I mean, the company has smart people who obviously know more about how these things work than your average Joe who just wants the damned thing to work like it should.
I think the real issue is education - your average CD listener isn't an idiot, he or she just has better things to do than understand why the CD he or she bought at Strawberry's won't play in his or her car. If the entertainment industry educates listeners their view of the problem first, then we'll have lost out on a chance to explain what's really going wrong.
Your average consumer doesn't care because your average user doesn't understand that anything is wrong. Educate them about the issues, don't just decry them as being idiots for liking Brittney Speares. Decry them for having no taste for liking Brittney Speares, but don't say they're stupid.:)
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For a while, I had my primary accout be a restricted user and was using Run As... to get adminstrator privileges for programs that needed that. After realizing that basically every single program I used required administrator rights, I gave up, and made my account an administrator account. (Most annoying was WinAmp - it turned out it required "Power User" privilege levels (or higher) to operate properly.)
(To be fair, I primarily use Windows for playing games, and most games for some stupid reason require you to be an administrator, including several of Microsoft's games. I don't really understand why - you can use DirectX as a normal user, and it isn't for the network portion. But the developers programmed them to check if you're an administrator and not run if you're not.)
The thing with Windows is that a ton of developers just assume that you'll be running as an administrator (probably because they're coming from writing for Windows 98 or the like), making it a real chore to be running Windows as anything but Administrator. Yeah, you can do it - but it rapidly becomes too much of a hassle to explain.
(Besides, who else thinks that even if you did teach people to run as non-admin and only use the admin account when needed, you'll still have users downloading trojan-program.exe and running it as admin when it tells them they have to? Maybe Microsoft should make it so that IE always runs as an unprivileged account. :))
Yeah, I agree. The issue comes up because a lot of developers hear "garbage collection" and think "memory leaks are impossible." Then they ignore things like removing objects from collections when they're done with them, and cause memory leaks in Java.
The point is that memory leaks are indeed possible in Java. Yes, it's because of bad coding practices - but honestly, that's really the cause of memory leaks in any program.
Far too many people assume that because Java is garbage collected it is somehow magically immune to memory leaks, and that simply isn't the case.
The simplest way to do this is to add event listeners to objects, because most people consider those "throw-away" objects. You just chuck an event listener onto a button, for example, and forget about it. This generally works because usually you'll drop references to the button when you're done with it, so all the event listeners will become garbage too.
The problem comes in situtations where that object reference persists (for example, if you make only one copy of your "About" window, but accidently add new event handlers to it every time it is displayed). You wind up with a memory leak, since you keep using memory for these objects that you then no longer use. But a collection still contains them, somewhere, so the garbage collector can't collect them.
Java memory leaks are always caused by something, somewhere, containing a reference to something that it no longer should. This makes tracking them down incredibly hard, since you have to figure out what, where, has a reference to an object that should be considered dead. These reference are almost always abstracted away into a collection object somewhere, making them even less obvious. In C/C++ you can usually get away with freeing something you know will no longer be used even if something still has an invalid reference to it. (Although, obviously, you still should remove the reference.)
This isn't really a flaw with the Java system, though. It's a flaw that any GC system can have and is caused by people failing to recognize existing strong references to an object. Sun has a "solution" to this in the java.lang.ref.WeakReference class, which allows you to stick "weak references" to an object into collections. This is only a partial solution, though, since the WeakReference object itself takes memory (albiet a much smaller amount) and still needs to be removed from the collection.
Slashdot's text modes are kinda confusing, it's actually rather easy to mess up the text mode and screw up the formatting of your post. For example, "Plain Old Text" preserves the newlines in your post... but also allows you to enter in HTML, so you can do things like emphasise your words.
HTML formatted, on the other hand, allows HTML but does not "preserve" newlines. (Actually, it does - Plain Old Text adds "<br>" at each newline, HTML formatted does not.)
Then there's Extrans, which does what most people would expect Plain Old Text to do - it makes the newlines you enter appear in the final HTML, and also escapes any HTML tags within the text block.
(Man, I've been reading the Register too often, I have no idea why I used the British spelling of "emphasize" up there.)
I have to wonder what on earth she was thinking when she chose that photo. She has better ones on her webpage... why choose that unless you want to be associated with Jabba?
Of course, BitTorrent is really easy to track, so if you're going to trade stuff illegally, BitTorrent isn't a good choice.
The only other legitimate use of "public" P2P software I've ever seen has been BitTorrent. Unfortunately, BitTorrent is a massive bandwidth hog and is actively banned at both school and work. Plus Suprnova has effectively made BitTorrent's primary use to illegally download copyrighted material. (Not to mention other sites that offer illegal torrents.)
(Well, that's not completely true... I once had someone download the RedHat 9 ISOs through a P2P network. I'm not convinced they were aware what they were downloading, though, since grabbing them at 9kb/s is almost definitely slower than using RedHat's FTP site.)
Ultimately I'd like to see these illegal uses of P2P shut down while allowing legitimate P2P like the AOL IM example I've given. As people have often mentioned, P2P is not in and of itself illegal. But I've rarely seen it used legally.
And what do you know? She could.
I mildly curious as to why she'd post the ugliest picture of her off her personal web page as her Blogger profile pic. But, being a lawyer, I guess that preditorial "Jabba the Hutt" look is what she's going for.
No idea.
McDonalds' current ad campaign. The thing is that I'm well aware that McDonalds exists... but I have no desire to eat there, because their food is crap.
"just do it."
It's familiar, but I don't know what it's for
Nike, of course. This one is often parodied, which might be why it sounds familiar. Yet again, I know the phrase, but I can't think of the last thing with a swoosh I've bought. I think it was a shirt some five or six years ago.
"takes a licking and keeps on ticking."
Ah, a blast from the past, when I was a small child watching TV: Timex. They don't really use that ad campaign anymore, I don't think.
Now that one I didn't know. And I wear a Timex watch. (Well, when I wear a watch at all.)
I wonder if there's a pattern here? :)
(Actually, probably not, since the watch was a gift. And I've actually bought McDonalds and Nike goods on occasion - just not recently.)
You know, maybe some CSS, use a sans-serif font, something like that...
(And, yeah, I can bearly read any of the link test in this beige color, it's practically invisible on my monitor, and this monitor has a rather nice contrast range too.)
Which was supposedly fixed four years ago.
C:\maven-1.0>bin\maven
:)
.__ __
| \/ |__ _Apache__ ___
| |\/| / _` \ V / -_) ' \ ~ intelligent projects ~
|_| |_\__,_|\_/\___|_||_| v. 1.0
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 seconds
Finished at: Fri Jul 16 17:34:27 EDT 2004
---
It's a console app. You call it and it builds "stuff", much like Ant does. I don't really know much more than that right now, though, so no complicated questions please.
(Oh, and that "screenshot" is messed up, I had to add a "." to make sure it stayed indented properly, Slashdot messed it up otherwise.)
"explorer.exe" - 980 KB
I'm fairly certain "iexplore.exe" is just a stub that launches "explorer.exe" on Windows XP systems. I think the two were distinct back in the Windows 95 days, but now they launch basically the same code.
As means of comparison, "firefox.exe" weighs in at 6.27MB on Windows, so it's fairly safe to assume that most of the Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer functionality is hidden away in miscellaneous libaries. (Like the ever-popular "mshtml.dll," which comes in a 2.66MB.)
As an example, I took the Explorer window I was using and checked the "About" dialog, it said "About Windows." I then entered "http://slashdot.org/" into the address bar, and rechecked the "About" dialog, and got "About Internet Explorer." I'm fairly certain that while there is an "iexplore.exe" file, all it does these days is launch "explorer.exe" with the options to make it act in "web browser" mode.
No you can't, if you disabled the Welcome screen. I got rid of the Welcome screen because I found it to be rather annoying, but disabling it for some unknown reasons prevents "fast user switching."
I mean, I suppose I could reenable it, but then I'd lose the ability to lock the computer such that you have to press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to log back on. I rather like this feature, since I live with something called "cats" which like to walk on the keyboard when I'm not around. With the "Lock Computer" screen up, nothing happens when they walk across the keyboard (well, the computer beeps), but they can't accidently log in to "Guest" or something.
Not to mention a ton of corporate users have the Welcome screen disabled for a variety of reasons.
Since Mozilla doesn't like people on Slashdot being able to trash-talk their browser by linking to bug reports, you'll have to copy the links to actually visit them, but:
2002-08-20 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163767 - root of all these bugs, Mozilla passes unknown protocols to Windows8 - same bug, spefically could launch IE and allow the execution of VBScript (possibly in the local security zone)8 - same bug, hcp: protocol could delete any file on your computer (wildcards allowed)0 - requested a whitelist to avoid future instances of the same bug
2002-08-20 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16364
2002-10-03 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17249
2002-10-07 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17301
This bug has been known about for two years. It still hasn't been fixed. When SP2 adds the "delete:" protocol or similar, then Mozilla is going to be vulnerable to that, too. And it looks like the developers have decided not to bother fixing it.
This isn't a triumph of open source - it's an example of how open source falls prey to exactly the same problems closed source does. Except publically, so you can point to these discussions to demonstrate that they knew about the issues for two years.
Suffice it to say that while Internet Explorer use is fairly high on Slashdot, it's still used far less than average. I would expect Mozilla usage in Slashdot users to have increased since then.
Heh - that sounds like what Netscape did around Netscape 4. Remember that time? Netscape 4 came out in June 1997, and then sat there. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer 4 came out in October of the same year and totally blew Netscape 4 away, but was rarely used. Three years later, Netscape finally releases Netscape 6, but it was already too late for them.
Likewise, Internet Explorer 6 was released in October 2001, and it's now been three years...
(Except Firefox isn't that much better than Internet Explorer to totally dominate it, like IE was compared to Netscape 4. Yes, the bundling thing helped - but Netscape 4 really was that bad so that Internet Explorer 4+ was truly superior.)
The problem is that Opera includes the string "MSIE" in their default user agent to maintain some kind of compatibility with scripts searching for MSIE. However, due to the brain-dead way IE allows you to support PNGs with alpha, (namely, creating a blank space to place the image over), Opera won't display anything for the image. This, not surprisingly, isn't that desirable, since Opera supports PNGs perfectly.
Instead of checking for MSIE, I find it's best to check for the existance of the "filters" collection on an object since Opera doesn't support it and as far as I know no browser other than MSIE does. So what you basically do is pick an element that you know will have filters and then see if the filters collection on it is null. Due to the way JavaScript works with properties on elements, browsers that don't support filters will instead report that the "filters" property is null, and IE will report that it's a collection.
Yes, <ecode> is broken, so no indentation, but here goes:
This script works to detect if you're using MSIE and doesn't get "fooled" by Opera.You can see an example of where I used this script on my Final Fantasy XI Skillchains Tool - the page will display properly in Opera, MSIE, and Mozilla, with PNGs displaying alpha. (Note that I don't use the technique you use above, I actually replace the images during the onload event. Same basic idea.)
Oh, and while we're at it, the PNG rundown:
MSIE: Gamma broken when present, alpha broken
Mozilla: Perfect
Opera: Perfect
Konquerer: To the best of my knowledge, perfect
Safari: Gamma broken when absent
You are aware that there is more to anime than Dragon Ball Z, right?
Someone pointed out the MagiTek armor, complete with hood-ornament pilot, during the Zion scenes.
And, of course, once we got to the final fight scene, I just looked at my co-workers and said "Dragon Ball Z." I waited for Neo as Goku to go Super Saiyan and was disappointed that he instead fused with Smith at the end and then defeated him from the inside.
I do have to credit the third Matrix movie, though: before watching it, I thought a live-action Dragon Ball Z movie might look cool. After watching it I realized that it would be just as tedious using live action as it is in the cartoon.
(Another ancedote about the third movie involves my sister asking me if it was supposed to be a comedy. She figured they had to be trying for something that bad.)
Someone worked out the figures on this. 40% sounds, well, incredibly high. The only way they could match this figure was to count weekends - all of them. Given that there are 52 weekends in a year, some math gives us 28% of the year as being a weekend. So by simply not counting those dates we get a more reasonable 12%.
Now, obviously, the percentage probably should count weekends spent durning vacations, but I can't find a list of when Bush went on vacation, so I can't duplicate the research.
Besides, as Moore implies with that "received a memo about Osama bin Laden," it's not like Bush wasn't doing work while on those vacations - otherwise, why would he be reading a memo on vacation?
Half the pages that don't work out there are thanks to Mozilla dropping support for "layers" without offering any explanation for how to reobtain this functionality. (You do it by "getElementById()", as it turns out, which is in fact standards compliant and works on MSIE, Mozilla, and Opera, but a word of warning would have been nice. Like, say, a "Transitioning from Netscape 4 for Web Developers" document. But no... at least, not that I could ever find, and I looked.)
Basically, if Mozilla would be kind enough to either re-add support for "layers" or at the very least support MSIE's "all" collection (like Opera does), you'd find that suddenly a very large collection of web pages would magically start working with very little other changes required.
But, hey, the "all" collection wasn't invented by Mozilla and completely duplicates the "getElementById()" method, so who am I to expect them to actually go for compatibility with the web browser used by the vast majority of users.
Seriously, it looks like whoever designed that page was designed to work in both Netscape 4 and MSIE, but then Netscape broke backwards compatibility with their own browser, and now it doesn't. While all my new stuff supports Mozilla, MSIE, and Opera properly, my older stuff didn't for quite a while due to Mozilla removing the "layers" collection.
In almost every restraunt if you ask for tea you'll get unsweetened hot tea, usually with cream and sugar available to be added if you wish. If you ask for iced tea you'll get unsweetened iced tea with a slice of lemon and sugar available to be added if you wish.
While coffee does reign as the "hot drink" here for the most part, you can usually get tea at any place that serves coffee. I'm fairly sure you can get hot tea at McDonalds and Burger King here - but I usually don't want tea with fast food (and, based on everything else there, the tea would be crap anyway), so I haven't tried recently. I suppose it could be an interesting experiment...
Most fast food restraunts here don't actually give you a filled cup any more. They give you an empty cup and have you swing by the soda fountain. I know they include a spigget for hot water. I'm fairly sure you can get a tea bag too.
My father is a tea drinker - I usually stick with soda or iced tea :) - so this is mostly based on times I've eaten out with him. (And, IMNSHO, sweetening tea ruins it. I prefer it without cream, too, but cream is OK. Adding sugar to coffee is also an abomination.)
I really would like to see that feature added to X. You can (sorta) do it with VNC or Remote Desktop in Windows (sorta means "entire desktop only, not a single app") - it would be really nice if you could take a GUI-based program running on some other computer and "forward" it to your own computer, without restarting the application.
IMO, that's a weakness of X - something that X should do, and not a strength of the console. They both should do it. As I'm sure everyone knows, screen is incredibly useful. Something like it for X would be really nice, too.
I don't know if it's so much "doesn't care" as "doesn't understand." I mean, what on earth does it mean that a CD doesn't conform to the CD standard?
Does that mean it has a larger than normal jewel case? Does it have a special poster placed in place of the usual little booklet at the beginning? Is the CD green instead of the standard silver color?
Of course, what such a label would really mean is that the CD doesn't follow the standard to ensure it plays in every CD player, but such a label could easily be confused or even be thought of as a good thing. ("Yeah, it doesn't conform to the CD standard - it's, like, going against the trend, or something, so it's cool.")
A useful label might be a warning that the disc may not play in all CD players. However, that will likely get blamed on the CD players and not the CD itself. I mean, it's just a CD - if the CD player can't play it, it must be because the CD player is too old or broken or something.
The real problem is education. Users really don't understand how a CD player works or why copyright protection harms thier ability to use what they are willing to pay for. (Like, say, how I can't play WarCraft III any more because it randomly decided I pirated it, which pisses me off since I wasted money on the "special edition." In fact, I can't play any Blizzard game on my computer, since whatever they use for copy protection flat out doesn't work on my machine. End result: I don't play Blizzard games.)
The companies claim that the problem is with the pirates or with the user's hardware. And who is your average user to disagree? I mean, the company has smart people who obviously know more about how these things work than your average Joe who just wants the damned thing to work like it should.
I think the real issue is education - your average CD listener isn't an idiot, he or she just has better things to do than understand why the CD he or she bought at Strawberry's won't play in his or her car. If the entertainment industry educates listeners their view of the problem first, then we'll have lost out on a chance to explain what's really going wrong.
Your average consumer doesn't care because your average user doesn't understand that anything is wrong. Educate them about the issues, don't just decry them as being idiots for liking Brittney Speares. Decry them for having no taste for liking Brittney Speares, but don't say they're stupid. :)