For possibly the great majority of the population, music can be compared to fashion; does not really matter if the art is good per se, what matters is the trend and popularity, on a local scale (what my friends listen to) and global scale (media).
With the rock'n'roll revolution in the fifties, lots of teenagers liked that new music in part because it wasn't their parents' music. Same story can be said of disco, rap and grunge.
Problem with the long-tail approach is that people mostly judge music by non-musical criteria.
From Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-657: (emphasis mine)
44. The Commission notes that Canadian ISPs have used certain ITMPs for the purposes of network security and integrity. Specifically, these ITMPs have been employed to protect users from network threats such as malicious software, spam, and distribution of illicit materials. In the Commission’s view, such activities are unlikely to trigger complaints or concerns under the Act and are a necessary part of an ISP’s network operations.
45. The Commission is therefore not addressing, in this decision, ITMPs used only for the purpose of network security, nor those employed temporarily to address unpredictable traffic events (e.g. traffic surges due to global events and failures on part of an ISP’s network) in order to protect network integrity.
I'm sorry, but I don't grok how a router can tell an IP packet has an illicit payload. Now wouldn't that be just what the ISP need to throttle any P2P protocol, in fact making all this “warn before you harm” policy moot?
Imagine if your blog suddenly became undisplayable because commenter number 32 input some broken HTML, and your not-quite-perfect blog software didn't quite know how to launder it [...] could make your site completely unavailable.
Well, it would be a shame to use any software that'd break like that! How come that the web is the sole programming environment where it's impossible to get an error, where programmers are thus encouraged to make errors, where coders can ignore string validation (and supposing a strict HTML parser, they'd blame the parser just like a clueless newbie would blame a compiler)? Please, we're not talking about complicated markup nor about string validation done in assembly or C -- web languages have easy built-in routines that do just that.
HTML monkeys rely on that great "error-recovery" misfeature and that alone explains why browsers are so big and slow. Every tag-soup-recovery method used by MSIE must be reproduced, so the standard shifts to how-does-MSIE-handle-that. Had Netscape won the browsers war, the same situation would prevail.
And there is no reasonable explanation nor incentive to base the web on human error recovery! Come on now. The web would still exist if it required strict conformance to standards. Javascript syntax errors are fatal, how come people who can't code HTML properly are able to code syntax-error-free javascript?
conclusive evidence that life existed elsewhere in the universe and could make itself known would cause the collapse of fundamentalist religions, to the enormous benefit of the rest of us
I don't argue that the fundamentalist religion collapse would greatly improve mankind's quality of life.
But look at the conclusive evidence showing evolution, dismissed by the fundamentalists.
I really don't believe extraterrestrial light footprints showing presence of life molecules, or even radio communication would defeat fundamentalists' beliefs - we have dinosaurs fossils and still they don't believe dinosaurs existed, for $DEITY's sake!
Tidy is great as others mentioned. Will even allow if you feel confident to cherrypick the data you want to scavenge with XSLT.
Separating grain from chaff
A static HTML project has numerous index2.old.html, index2.html, index_2.html, project2.html.old and so on - files that you just aren't sure are useful?
Copy the project directory (touch all the files) and do a wget -r on the tree; by looking at the access time, you'll know all internal referenced files. Alternatively, scan the webserver logfiles to know which files are useful.
Be sure your filesystem is configured to register access times if you pick the first method...
(As a bonus, a close peek on the 404s might give you some answers on mis-used capitalization of filenames.)
Lynx / Links / ELinks
Can be used to dump the text data of old and unmaintainable HTML documents; most useful when trying to scavenge only the text contents to put in a database or so.
Everytime you play the proprietary software game, you lose a bit of your freedom and get nearer to Orwell's world.
How can you be sure your software is not spying on you? For 1 caught Sony case, how many lesser known applications violate your privacy? Not even counting keyloggers and other obvious malware. XP phones home. How many other apps do that?
Even in the political world, proprietary software brings us closer to 1984. Seems every voting machine provider uses closed software, supposedly for "security". How can we trust these black boxes?
In the good old days of desktop computing without a network, closed source software could be trusted to keep your privacy; there was not any way to transmit the information anyway. But now, any trivial program is able to report your activities to the whole world.
Seems to me proprietary software is a dead end when privacy is involved.
If I told my great-great-great-great-grandmother that in the year 2006, most homes would have a box spying and reporting people activities, backed by the richest company in the world, she'd probably laugh. I'm not.
For more critical needs, where research time needs to be low and source accountability needs to be high, beginning at a "starting point" is not an option.
I know Wikipedia's servers are not always as quick as we'd want, but still, 30 seconds is not a lot of time and might give you precious pointers and keywords for further research; cross-checking data is a lot easier than finding new information. How many times have you googled and refined your searches using result data? bingo.
Are they unavoidable, or just a symptom of lazy coding, or both?
I wouldn't say lazy, but naive. Lots of people now cut their teeth at programming with HTML/Javascript and a simple server-side scripting language, like PHP or ASP. For a reason unknown, these simple languages (PHP especially) try to create a blanket so thick around the coder that most of them don't even think about validating input.
Crap like auto-string escaping, crap like automagic global variables, crap like easy access to eval(), auto variable casting, these help when learning to program so you can concentrate on the task at hand, but become a big fat no-no when deploying stuff in a networked environment.
Going back to my first programs in BASIC/C/C++, they were probably filled with holes; but for sure they weren't available for the world to hack.
There is experience that will follow you even though technologies change; what I learnt while using DOS is still relevant (creating directories is still something I do); a strong OOP formation in C++ makes Java/C# easier; knowing how pointers work makes a better coder in any language.
Even if experience is a great mistress, everything changes so quickly that continuous self-education I think is a must. Recall all the hot technologies of 1996 - only 10 years ago, a small fraction of your life in the workforce. Almost nobody wrote Java, C#/.NET didn't exist, most dynamic webpages were written in Perl, CSS wasn't there yet, XML was unborn, there were no "Seamless Open Integrated Solution Providers (!)", etc, etc, etc. Now think 1985. 1975. 1965. Somebody born in 1945 and who worked all his life on computers will retire in 2010.
Problem with courses is that they always lag a couple of years behind - they still teach table-based HTML tagsoup... and though you may have a 12-hour intensive session on a subject, you won't be ready to use it before you play on your own time with it.
You don't need to lose your life, I guess spending a couple of hours a week on new technologies is more than enough. You don't have to know everything, just focus on what is created in your field.
Okay, if the users wanted keyboard shortcuts, why didn't the web developers include them?
Two great reasons:
Lack of standard available key combinations; If I binded an action to accesskey F, chances are it'd spawn the File menu. The only "sure" keys are the numbers; there is more or less a standard, access key 1 for home, 3 for sitemap, 4 for search, 9 for a contact form, 0 for accessibility statement... That does not leave lots of keys for original purposes;
Carelessness of web developers; 99% of the web is pure invalid markup crap; how often do you see a form with label, tabindex, optgroup? 99% of the web developers have no clue that the W3C exists, that the above tags exist...
Remember that for most web "pros", webpages are designed for the author and not the user; Leave my fonts at 6px or else my layout will break!. Pffffff!
While Xen appears as a neat package, why choose Xen instead of vservers?
The hardware cost of running multiple copies of the same OS with vservers is smaller than Xen - there is one and only one copy of glibc in memory, one and only scheduler, and so on.
Seems to me the Emotional Quotient is a simple reaction to IQ. "So, men perform better in one test, let's find another evaluation that is broadly similar in name, mixes concepts and in which woman get the best results".
Nobody complains that women and asian people are smaller on average then men and african people, but when it comes to IQ, seems every group on average should get the same average (men, women, caucasian, black, rich, poor, Britney Spears fans, music lovers, and so on). Absurd.
Why should these quotient measurements give equal score to all sides? Why would nature divide intelligence equally between gender and races?
The greatest advantage Atom has over RSS is indeed its eXtensibility.
So while RSS is stuck with regular HTML (escaped markup, whoa!) and images in its contents, Atom can already embed other XML namespaces like XHTML, SVG, MathML, FOAF, Dublin Core...
I think the comparison is similar to the HTML/XHTML one: though right now they can give the same results, in the (not so distant I hope) future Atom/XHTML will become the languages of choice.
Not a lot of people use XHTML+SVG yet, but with Opera supporting it (and FF in its 1.1 release we all hope), its mindshare will grow.
We all drool in front of the Google Maps API, but let's see what happens when more and more stuff becomes really semantically significant.
Some short classical games can keep depth throughout the years. Here I'm thinking about chess, go, and especially bridge. Though these games were available before computers, their computerized ports make it easy to find online partners for an half-hour session, any time of day.
Though I played bridge for several years now, I still feel like a newbie and will feel that way even when I'm retired - and that's the appeal. I can't imagine myself still playing Bard's Tale or Ultima IV several times a month; these long games lose their appeal after a while.
Seems you weren't around in the late nineties when we had to support 2 different codebases when writing Javascript/Jscript. It was more trouble because in those days the 2 models were mostly incompatible.
Now as Safari/MSIE/FF are DOM-based, its a lot easier - sure there are quirks, but it only means "Build it so it works in FF, then tweak for others" instead of "do a 'if (MSIE)' first and then rewrite everything in the 'else' for NN4".
The product page boasts their RDBMS is written in pure Java.
Databases engines must mainly do hardcore work on large sets of data (index, sort, merge, uniq, manipulate dates...); using Java for data crunching, is that really a neat idea?
Aside from the needed feature set, speed is I think the most important factor when picking up a RDBMS. I guess this is one of the major reasons for the quick adoption of SQLite and the popularity of MySQL vs. PostgreSQL.
Re:Lazy IE Only Scripted Webpages...
on
Firefox In Print
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Biting the troll.
You got it right: interpretation. Like if I told you "John says to Paul that he is fat". Who is fat? MSIE says it's John, Firefox says it's Paul, Opera says it's both, Safari says neither.
The last thing you want from any language is random behavior. That's what you get from tag soup. You get no point from saying that the average person writing HTML has no clue so browsers must cope with that; it's because early browsers allowed tag soup that we're caught with it now. If malformed HTML were not possible then, people would've learned the proper syntax, like they do in each and every other programming language.
We are now in a position where we can (and must) break the circle, using XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml, which will fail (just like a C compiler would fail on a missing semicolon) on bad-formedness. This will allow for a flawless integration of new XML modules (MathML, SVG, XForms, RDF,...), simpler parsers and make the web evolve.
Another soul who confuses free as in speech and free as in beer.
More than 80% of the software written never goes on the store racks; it's custom-made for a particular purpose for a specific customer. The customer wants software that works and he pays you to write it. Now, whatever licence you distribute your works with don't matter: you get paid anyway. It'll be free software if you grant the 4 freedoms to your customer, no matter what, you get paid anyway.
Konsole is nice, with tab's, I just with there was a tabbed RXVT then life would be truly sweet. (No tabbed putty yet, come on!)
No point in having tabbed terminal emulators when you use GNU Screen. Just a couple of keybindings to learn (^A c to create a new "tab", ^A 0 or ^A 1 and so on to see the Nth tab). Would work in PuTTY too, and all terms I can think of.
I personally hate all these Konsoles, gnome-terminal and others that take forever to load - if I wanted bells and whistles, I wouldn't use the comandline, wouldn't I?
Slashdot Mirror
For possibly the great majority of the population, music can be compared to fashion; does not really matter if the art is good per se, what matters is the trend and popularity, on a local scale (what my friends listen to) and global scale (media).
With the rock'n'roll revolution in the fifties, lots of teenagers liked that new music in part because it wasn't their parents' music. Same story can be said of disco, rap and grunge.
Problem with the long-tail approach is that people mostly judge music by non-musical criteria.
From Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2009-657: (emphasis mine)
I'm sorry, but I don't grok how a router can tell an IP packet has an illicit payload. Now wouldn't that be just what the ISP need to throttle any P2P protocol, in fact making all this “warn before you harm” policy moot?
Well, it would be a shame to use any software that'd break like that! How come that the web is the sole programming environment where it's impossible to get an error, where programmers are thus encouraged to make errors, where coders can ignore string validation (and supposing a strict HTML parser, they'd blame the parser just like a clueless newbie would blame a compiler)? Please, we're not talking about complicated markup nor about string validation done in assembly or C -- web languages have easy built-in routines that do just that.
HTML monkeys rely on that great "error-recovery" misfeature and that alone explains why browsers are so big and slow. Every tag-soup-recovery method used by MSIE must be reproduced, so the standard shifts to how-does-MSIE-handle-that. Had Netscape won the browsers war, the same situation would prevail.
And there is no reasonable explanation nor incentive to base the web on human error recovery! Come on now. The web would still exist if it required strict conformance to standards. Javascript syntax errors are fatal, how come people who can't code HTML properly are able to code syntax-error-free javascript?
That more and more portable music players are sold does not mean that home stereos are on the way out!
I don't argue that the fundamentalist religion collapse would greatly improve mankind's quality of life.
But look at the conclusive evidence showing evolution, dismissed by the fundamentalists.
I really don't believe extraterrestrial light footprints showing presence of life molecules, or even radio communication would defeat fundamentalists' beliefs - we have dinosaurs fossils and still they don't believe dinosaurs existed, for $DEITY's sake!
As Pine is not free software, time to move on to mutt or its next-gen friend, mutt-ng. No need to use a bloated GUI app to read mail.
As for what "pine" means, here is the truth: "Pine Is Not Enough".
Tidy is great as others mentioned. Will even allow if you feel confident to cherrypick the data you want to scavenge with XSLT.
Separating grain from chaff
A static HTML project has numerous index2.old.html, index2.html, index_2.html, project2.html.old and so on - files that you just aren't sure are useful?
Copy the project directory (touch all the files) and do a wget -r on the tree; by looking at the access time, you'll know all internal referenced files. Alternatively, scan the webserver logfiles to know which files are useful.
Be sure your filesystem is configured to register access times if you pick the first method...
(As a bonus, a close peek on the 404s might give you some answers on mis-used capitalization of filenames.)
Lynx / Links / ELinks
Can be used to dump the text data of old and unmaintainable HTML documents; most useful when trying to scavenge only the text contents to put in a database or so.
Everytime you play the proprietary software game, you lose a bit of your freedom and get nearer to Orwell's world.
How can you be sure your software is not spying on you? For 1 caught Sony case, how many lesser known applications violate your privacy? Not even counting keyloggers and other obvious malware. XP phones home. How many other apps do that?
Even in the political world, proprietary software brings us closer to 1984. Seems every voting machine provider uses closed software, supposedly for "security". How can we trust these black boxes?
In the good old days of desktop computing without a network, closed source software could be trusted to keep your privacy; there was not any way to transmit the information anyway. But now, any trivial program is able to report your activities to the whole world.
Seems to me proprietary software is a dead end when privacy is involved.
If I told my great-great-great-great-grandmother that in the year 2006, most homes would have a box spying and reporting people activities, backed by the richest company in the world, she'd probably laugh. I'm not.
I know Wikipedia's servers are not always as quick as we'd want, but still, 30 seconds is not a lot of time and might give you precious pointers and keywords for further research; cross-checking data is a lot easier than finding new information. How many times have you googled and refined your searches using result data? bingo.
I wouldn't say lazy, but naive. Lots of people now cut their teeth at programming with HTML/Javascript and a simple server-side scripting language, like PHP or ASP. For a reason unknown, these simple languages (PHP especially) try to create a blanket so thick around the coder that most of them don't even think about validating input.
Crap like auto-string escaping, crap like automagic global variables, crap like easy access to eval(), auto variable casting, these help when learning to program so you can concentrate on the task at hand, but become a big fat no-no when deploying stuff in a networked environment.
Going back to my first programs in BASIC/C/C++, they were probably filled with holes; but for sure they weren't available for the world to hack.
The question is will it be complete and compile? Don't they have to hide parts of Windows that are licensed from other companies?
Windows will still be distributed as binaries, having this source code does not give any guarantee about what's really running on your system.
There is experience that will follow you even though technologies change; what I learnt while using DOS is still relevant (creating directories is still something I do); a strong OOP formation in C++ makes Java/C# easier; knowing how pointers work makes a better coder in any language.
Even if experience is a great mistress, everything changes so quickly that continuous self-education I think is a must. Recall all the hot technologies of 1996 - only 10 years ago, a small fraction of your life in the workforce. Almost nobody wrote Java, C#/.NET didn't exist, most dynamic webpages were written in Perl, CSS wasn't there yet, XML was unborn, there were no "Seamless Open Integrated Solution Providers (!)", etc, etc, etc. Now think 1985. 1975. 1965. Somebody born in 1945 and who worked all his life on computers will retire in 2010.
Problem with courses is that they always lag a couple of years behind - they still teach table-based HTML tagsoup... and though you may have a 12-hour intensive session on a subject, you won't be ready to use it before you play on your own time with it.
You don't need to lose your life, I guess spending a couple of hours a week on new technologies is more than enough. You don't have to know everything, just focus on what is created in your field.
Two great reasons:
- Lack of standard available key combinations
; If I binded an action to accesskey F, chances are it'd spawn the File menu. The only "sure" keys are the numbers; there is more or less a standard, access key 1 for home, 3 for sitemap, 4 for search, 9 for a contact form, 0 for accessibility statement... That does not leave lots of keys for original purposes;
- Carelessness of web developers
; 99% of the web is pure invalid markup crap; how often do you see a form with label, tabindex, optgroup? 99% of the web developers have no clue that the W3C exists, that the above tags exist...
Remember that for most web "pros", webpages are designed for the author and not the user; Leave my fonts at 6px or else my layout will break!. Pffffff!While Xen appears as a neat package, why choose Xen instead of vservers?
The hardware cost of running multiple copies of the same OS with vservers is smaller than Xen - there is one and only one copy of glibc in memory, one and only scheduler, and so on.
10-year old nephew and a scanner.
Seems to me the Emotional Quotient is a simple reaction to IQ. "So, men perform better in one test, let's find another evaluation that is broadly similar in name, mixes concepts and in which woman get the best results".
Nobody complains that women and asian people are smaller on average then men and african people, but when it comes to IQ, seems every group on average should get the same average (men, women, caucasian, black, rich, poor, Britney Spears fans, music lovers, and so on). Absurd.
Why should these quotient measurements give equal score to all sides? Why would nature divide intelligence equally between gender and races?
All Political Correct crap to me.
The greatest advantage Atom has over RSS is indeed its eXtensibility.
So while RSS is stuck with regular HTML (escaped markup, whoa!) and images in its contents, Atom can already embed other XML namespaces like XHTML, SVG, MathML, FOAF, Dublin Core...
I think the comparison is similar to the HTML/XHTML one: though right now they can give the same results, in the (not so distant I hope) future Atom/XHTML will become the languages of choice.
Not a lot of people use XHTML+SVG yet, but with Opera supporting it (and FF in its 1.1 release we all hope), its mindshare will grow.
We all drool in front of the Google Maps API, but let's see what happens when more and more stuff becomes really semantically significant.
Some short classical games can keep depth throughout the years. Here I'm thinking about chess, go, and especially bridge. Though these games were available before computers, their computerized ports make it easy to find online partners for an half-hour session, any time of day.
Though I played bridge for several years now, I still feel like a newbie and will feel that way even when I'm retired - and that's the appeal. I can't imagine myself still playing Bard's Tale or Ultima IV several times a month; these long games lose their appeal after a while.
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
Seems you weren't around in the late nineties when we had to support 2 different codebases when writing Javascript/Jscript. It was more trouble because in those days the 2 models were mostly incompatible.
Now as Safari/MSIE/FF are DOM-based, its a lot easier - sure there are quirks, but it only means "Build it so it works in FF, then tweak for others" instead of "do a 'if (MSIE)' first and then rewrite everything in the 'else' for NN4".
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
The product page boasts their RDBMS is written in pure Java.
Databases engines must mainly do hardcore work on large sets of data (index, sort, merge, uniq, manipulate dates...); using Java for data crunching, is that really a neat idea?
Aside from the needed feature set, speed is I think the most important factor when picking up a RDBMS. I guess this is one of the major reasons for the quick adoption of SQLite and the popularity of MySQL vs. PostgreSQL.
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
Biting the troll.
...), simpler parsers and make the web evolve.
You got it right: interpretation. Like if I told you "John says to Paul that he is fat". Who is fat? MSIE says it's John, Firefox says it's Paul, Opera says it's both, Safari says neither.
The last thing you want from any language is random behavior. That's what you get from tag soup. You get no point from saying that the average person writing HTML has no clue so browsers must cope with that; it's because early browsers allowed tag soup that we're caught with it now. If malformed HTML were not possible then, people would've learned the proper syntax, like they do in each and every other programming language.
We are now in a position where we can (and must) break the circle, using XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml, which will fail (just like a C compiler would fail on a missing semicolon) on bad-formedness. This will allow for a flawless integration of new XML modules (MathML, SVG, XForms, RDF,
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
Another soul who confuses free as in speech and free as in beer.
More than 80% of the software written never goes on the store racks; it's custom-made for a particular purpose for a specific customer. The customer wants software that works and he pays you to write it. Now, whatever licence you distribute your works with don't matter: you get paid anyway. It'll be free software if you grant the 4 freedoms to your customer, no matter what, you get paid anyway.
You wrote some code, and you got paid, get it?
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
No point in having tabbed terminal emulators when you use GNU Screen. Just a couple of keybindings to learn (^A c to create a new "tab", ^A 0 or ^A 1 and so on to see the Nth tab). Would work in PuTTY too, and all terms I can think of.
I personally hate all these Konsoles, gnome-terminal and others that take forever to load - if I wanted bells and whistles, I wouldn't use the comandline, wouldn't I?
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?