Of course, with all the auto update stuff enabled in SP2, how often do you really need to go to WindowsUpdate anymore?
So you're afraid to use Internet Explorer, but you still trust Microsoft enough to let them update your system without your screening their patches? I guess your tinfoil hat is just a fashion statement...
I don't care about hover text. The purpose of the alt text is to make the image accessibility compliant. Without which, the whole page is not XHTML 1.0 compliant.
Your mailto link would also fail for anyone with JS turned off... including IE users. You can't blame firefox for that.
No, I can't blame Firefox for failing to use a feature that's disabled. But I can blame Firefox for not correctly implementing that feature when it's not disabled. Especially in this case, where they seem to have broken a very basic DOM API.
If you want to hide you emails, convert the letters to their numerical equivs manually...
I used to do even more than that. I used Jim Tuckek's Email Protector, which not only saves your address as an encrypted string, but uses obfuscated JavaScript code to create the mailto: link, to make it more difficult for a spambot to detect what's being done.
But then I realized that this was overkill (and overkill that was making my web page hard to maintain). There's no arms race between spybot authors and web page designers. Spambots don't go around trying to figure out how people have obfuscated their mailto: links. There are too many ways it can be done, So spambots don't bother with any scanning beyond simple pattern matching.
My email address may look easy to find to you, but you're a carbon based unit. No spambot is going to go around reverse-engineering scripts on the off chance they generate mailto:s. And if they did, your hex codes would be just as vulerable as my simple strings.
You're right, that's the point. But how do you get to that point? You code to the standard, not the browser. Unfortunately, most web designers don't do that.
You can never be absolutely sure that any system isn't penetrated. You always just go with the odds. I would submit that if you browse with Firefox, and only switch to IE when you have problems (I use the "View this page with IE" extension), you're about as safe as you're going to get.
IIS-based web servers do have a lot of security problems, but the idea that they'd be covertly taken over by adware people is silly. Running drive-by downloads on porn servers is more their speed. These are not evil geniuses. If they were, their spyware wouldn't fuck up our systems as much as they do.
Firefox is hardly bug-free. Use it to access my resume and you'll find a really nasty Javascript bug. (The link to my email is generated on the fly, to hide it from spambots. The hover behavior works correctly in IE but not Firefox.) At this point in time, Firefox has a lot fewer bugs (or at least a lot fewer bugs that really matter) than Internet Explorer. But this has as much to do with the increasing flakiness of Internet Explorer as with the improvement in Firefox.
I wasn't aware that security was a religious issue...
"You should avoid using Microsoft software because it's insecure" is a security argument. "You should never use Internet Explorer, even if you need it to do your job, and you know that the web server you want to access is not run by spyware people" is a religious argument.
What do you know? Not a lot. I see public Internet servers that use ActiveX all the time. If nothing else, you need it to access windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
Sure, ActiveX will go away eventually. Microsoft itself is moving away from it. But that has nothing to do with what end users need now
If the result of this is MS fully opening the MS Office file formats, so that every other office suite out there can read and write them with 100% compatibility, then that's great!
Except that lots of third-party apps already know how to read Office formats. Open Office is a prime example. The big problem isn't getting the data out of those proprietary formats. (Which are, contrary to myth, fairly well documented.) The problem is not that nobody knows how to get the data out of Word or Excel -- the problem is that the data is extremely messy. You import it into another word processor or spreadsheet, and you just can't help losing a lot of structure and formatting. Fixing this problem would amount to a major achievement in Artificial Intelligence!
Working with XML instead of RTF or a binary format helps, because XML is so much easier to manipulate, and because there's so much really good XML software out there. So you'll get big improvements -- but you'll still face the basic messiness issue.
If you want 100% compatibility, you need to go the other way -- use these new Office features to force Office software to use non-proprietary formats. You can do this because Office now allows you to do your editing around an arbitrary XML schema. (This is necessary so that Word and Excel can function as Web Services clients.) So it's perfectly feasible, for example, to write Word and Excel plugins that manipulate Open Office formats instead of Microsoft formats. Then you can tell your employees, "OK, you can continue to use Word and Excel, but you have to use these plugins so that all our new documents are in a non-proprietary format, and we no longer have all that Microsoft lockin."
Is this just another move to encroach on the open source community?
Nothing a really big company does is as simple as that. Without a doubt, there are decision makers in Redmond whose careers depend on their maintaining the Microsoft Monopoly, and look at any competition, including the Open Source community, the way a wolf looks at an elk herd. If they can find a way to use a particular initiative to screw people over, they will. But that doesn't mean that the screwover is the main motivation of the initiative.
Most of the people who work in Redmond are hardcore technodweebs who just always have to use the latest and coolest technology. That's why Microsoft apps break compatibility with every release, and everything you learned about one version of the platform is obsolete with the next one. And it's why they're so infatuated with XML, even though XML is something of a threat to their monopoly: because it's cool.
Perhaps these websites should move from building apps with ActiveX? just a thought
Absolutely. And they should be more standards compliant, so a web page looks the same on all browsers. And there are a lot of other reasons web servers (or any kind of server) shouldn't rely on Microsoft's baroque, unpredictable, bit-tweaking approach to software.
But the fact is, a lot of web servers do use Microsoft technology, and a lot of people have to be able to deal with that. It's part of their job, or something else that's important to them, and their not interested in any Microsoft-Mozilla religious war. If you forget that, you have have no hope of helping people move away from their dependency on Mister Bill's Empire.
All these years, and it still works? That's solid-state technology for you!
You know, all these years, I've been seeing the frappé button on blenders, and it never occurred to me to look the word up. It just means "thick liquid". I guess calling the highest speed "liquify" wasn't fancy enough.
After removal, they ran Webroot's Spy Sweeper 3.0. It was able to detect '900 traces of 48 distinct threats still present, including two keyloggers and three Trojans.
Means nothing, unless you're sure that Spy Sweeper doesn't do false positive. And it fact, that product seems to do a lot of them. Right now, it's insisting that I have the 2nd-thought and Slackbot trojans. But those guys are pretty well documented, and I can't find the slightest trace of either.
And if Gator was responsible for most spyware, that'd be an option. But they're not. They don't even write it -- they just bundle it with their product, like a lot of other publishers.
Until recently, most spyware was installed, directly or indirectly, by product bundles like Gator. (I say "indirectly", because of lot of spyware tries to download and install more spyware.) Which is why I am very careful about what I download. "Free" screensavers seem to be particularly nasty.
But nowadays the authors of "drive by" spyware seem to have gotten very good. You can get infected just by pointing Internet Explorer at the wrong web site. Possibly you can prevent this by turning up the security settings for IE -- but I wouldn't even count on that.
Two explanations for this: (1) they use some silly high-tech method to generate the heat; (2) somebody just thought it'd be cool to relable "heating coils" as "infrared beam generators".
Back in the 60s, somebody came out with a blender that had a simple non-integrated rectifier. Now, a rectifier is a solid-state component, so they announed that they had invented THE SOLID-STATE BLENDER!
I'm reminded of the sophisticated -- and useless -- kitchen gadgets in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. A movie every techie should sit through at least once before being allowed to design anything.
I'm sure that's by design. You don't want an indexing bot crawling around random file systems. The impact on network performance can be huge, and you risk publicizing senstive data. With web content, it makes sense to assume that the server's content is for public consumption unless somebody makes a specific decision to lock it down. For a file server, the opposite assumption makes sense.
Most of Slashdot's readers have never heard of the Curriculum Vitae. In the U.S., it's usually called a Resume. Slashdot editors really need to pay more attention to the "WTF is a..." factor.
...but if you're sending out that many resumes with such bad results, I have to suspect you're doing something wrong. Have you ever had somebody review your resume for you? People are not objective about their own writing.
It's one thing to make enough hydrogen to replace oil in your own country, But it would take a lot of power to generate enough hydrogen to become a major energy exporter. I don't know the figures, but I doubt if all of Iceland's volcanos between them (I think there are about 20) generate enough energy to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care about hover text. The purpose of the alt text is to make the image accessibility compliant. Without which, the whole page is not XHTML 1.0 compliant.
But then I realized that this was overkill (and overkill that was making my web page hard to maintain). There's no arms race between spybot authors and web page designers. Spambots don't go around trying to figure out how people have obfuscated their mailto: links. There are too many ways it can be done, So spambots don't bother with any scanning beyond simple pattern matching.
My email address may look easy to find to you, but you're a carbon based unit. No spambot is going to go around reverse-engineering scripts on the off chance they generate mailto:s. And if they did, your hex codes would be just as vulerable as my simple strings.
You're right, that's the point. But how do you get to that point? You code to the standard, not the browser. Unfortunately, most web designers don't do that.
IIS-based web servers do have a lot of security problems, but the idea that they'd be covertly taken over by adware people is silly. Running drive-by downloads on porn servers is more their speed. These are not evil geniuses. If they were, their spyware wouldn't fuck up our systems as much as they do.
Firefox is hardly bug-free. Use it to access my resume and you'll find a really nasty Javascript bug. (The link to my email is generated on the fly, to hide it from spambots. The hover behavior works correctly in IE but not Firefox.) At this point in time, Firefox has a lot fewer bugs (or at least a lot fewer bugs that really matter) than Internet Explorer. But this has as much to do with the increasing flakiness of Internet Explorer as with the improvement in Firefox.
Sure, ActiveX will go away eventually. Microsoft itself is moving away from it. But that has nothing to do with what end users need now
Working with XML instead of RTF or a binary format helps, because XML is so much easier to manipulate, and because there's so much really good XML software out there. So you'll get big improvements -- but you'll still face the basic messiness issue.
If you want 100% compatibility, you need to go the other way -- use these new Office features to force Office software to use non-proprietary formats. You can do this because Office now allows you to do your editing around an arbitrary XML schema. (This is necessary so that Word and Excel can function as Web Services clients.) So it's perfectly feasible, for example, to write Word and Excel plugins that manipulate Open Office formats instead of Microsoft formats. Then you can tell your employees, "OK, you can continue to use Word and Excel, but you have to use these plugins so that all our new documents are in a non-proprietary format, and we no longer have all that Microsoft lockin."
Most of the people who work in Redmond are hardcore technodweebs who just always have to use the latest and coolest technology. That's why Microsoft apps break compatibility with every release, and everything you learned about one version of the platform is obsolete with the next one. And it's why they're so infatuated with XML, even though XML is something of a threat to their monopoly: because it's cool.
But the fact is, a lot of web servers do use Microsoft technology, and a lot of people have to be able to deal with that. It's part of their job, or something else that's important to them, and their not interested in any Microsoft-Mozilla religious war. If you forget that, you have have no hope of helping people move away from their dependency on Mister Bill's Empire.
You know, all these years, I've been seeing the frappé button on blenders, and it never occurred to me to look the word up. It just means "thick liquid". I guess calling the highest speed "liquify" wasn't fancy enough.
Until recently, most spyware was installed, directly or indirectly, by product bundles like Gator. (I say "indirectly", because of lot of spyware tries to download and install more spyware.) Which is why I am very careful about what I download. "Free" screensavers seem to be particularly nasty.
But nowadays the authors of "drive by" spyware seem to have gotten very good. You can get infected just by pointing Internet Explorer at the wrong web site. Possibly you can prevent this by turning up the security settings for IE -- but I wouldn't even count on that.
Back in the 60s, somebody came out with a blender that had a simple non-integrated rectifier. Now, a rectifier is a solid-state component, so they announed that they had invented THE SOLID-STATE BLENDER!
I'm reminded of the sophisticated -- and useless -- kitchen gadgets in Terry Gilliam's Brazil . A movie every techie should sit through at least once before being allowed to design anything.
Moderation +1: sad, but true
I'm sure that's by design. You don't want an indexing bot crawling around random file systems. The impact on network performance can be huge, and you risk publicizing senstive data. With web content, it makes sense to assume that the server's content is for public consumption unless somebody makes a specific decision to lock it down. For a file server, the opposite assumption makes sense.
Most of Slashdot's readers have never heard of the Curriculum Vitae. In the U.S., it's usually called a Resume. Slashdot editors really need to pay more attention to the "WTF is a ..." factor.
...but if you're sending out that many resumes with such bad results, I have to suspect you're doing something wrong. Have you ever had somebody review your resume for you? People are not objective about their own writing.
We spend a lot of time talking about content management. There should really be a topic for it.
In any case, Kapor isn't criticising FireFox. He's just cautioning against the surreal optimism that always seems to surround open source projects.
It must be very nice to be the only non-idiot in sight. It saves you from all that time-wasting bullshit -- like stopping to think.
It's one thing to make enough hydrogen to replace oil in your own country, But it would take a lot of power to generate enough hydrogen to become a major energy exporter. I don't know the figures, but I doubt if all of Iceland's volcanos between them (I think there are about 20) generate enough energy to do that.