You really need to get a clue. Of course if you have applications that are for the public you want to be accessible to the widest number of people possible. However, the vast majority of web applications are made for use internally within a company and are not available to the public. Therefore, you're not excluding anyone at all as they are using what the company supports; in this case obviously it's IE. Furthermore, the W3C standards are not totally compliant with IE and anybody that has made a large scale CSS page knows that you will have to do a lot of tweaking in order for the page to look properly in IE and all other browsers. Most often you even have to include separate style sheets for different browsers depending on how complex your layout is.
Have you ever worked at a company where they have an "authorized list" of software? One that includes browsers other than IE? No? OK, I have. I have had to produce internal use only pages that support IE and Mozilla... in that short time span you speak of. Testing wasn't such a big deal. Run it in Mozilla. If it works, the HTML isn't broken. Then run it in IE and test your JavaScript, because of the event-handling differences.
What are you going to do if they give you a requirement to do it in that short, one week period to have it run on IE, Mozilla, Netscape, and Firefox? Hmm? You're going to sit there and not be able to deliver, because you have people who work for you who can't think outside of the box, since all you ever did in the past was design one-sided applications.
This is why there are W3C standards. If you build to the W3C standards, the browser the client uses should be immaterial.
The problem arises when you depend on proprietary extensions.
Also, based on your argument, what do you consider an acceptable loss from potential sales revenue? Do you consider excluding 10% of the market to be acceptable? What if that 10% had a large chunk of disposable income and would be more likely to buy your product? Just because the "majority" uses IE doesn't mean it's right to exclude the minority who choose not to or cannot.
Try doing that now. Nope, won't happen. You buy a computer and you get Windows. Period.
That's not entirely true. There are some sites on the web that will sell you PCs with some form of Linux pre-installed.
However, I did just recently have a polite version of "Fuck you" fight with HP Shopping. I wanted a laptop with a hard drive partitioned to my specifications. "No, we don't do that." So I asked if they'd sell me the laptop without Windows XP installed, yet ship the installation media, since it was included in the price. "No, because our contractual obligations require that we sell it with the latest version of Microsoft Windows installed."
I informed them that they lost the sale. All I wanted was a system I could dual-boot, and not have to deal with the hassle of having to burn the installation media (they put it on a partition on the hard drive you cannot access except through the Windows installation programs), repartition the hard drive, and reinstall the system.
They apologized for their web site not serving my needs and would pass it on to the appropriate people. I replied with a simple, "It's not about your web site. It's about someone sitting there, running FDISK, and watching an installation happen instead of applying the standard ghosted image." Even said I'd have been willing to wait a couple of extra weeks for the system.
The big houses apparently are not interested in knowledgable computer users. They only want the uneducated masses.
Actually, I don't believe telemarketers in the US are allowed to call cell phones. That would be like having junk mail sent to your house postage due, because you get charged some number of minutes of air time.
Even on my cell phone, I get some calls that are reported as not having an ID, but those are either friends who have something weird about their phone lines (VoIP stuff, sometimes), or are companies I already deal with calling me back about something I sent in an inquiry about.
Only because caller ID allows telemarketers and the like to come up as UNAVAILABLE. If they had to show an actual number where, when you dial it back, you get a person (probably at his or her home), caller ID would succeed wonderfully. Those telemarketers would receive plenty of callbacks when they're trying to sleep, eat, or might otherwise be involved in some kind of recreational activity. The phone company claims it's because they're behind their own PBX and don't transmit caller ID data. Well, they should at least know who owns the PBX, and could give you a main number for that company, saying that anything coming from there shows up as TELEMRKT CO 555-555-1212.
Someone will figure out a way to get some string past the Sender ID check (or most checks, for that matter). All that use of something like this will do is slow down the spammers for a short while. They'll figure out ways around it.
They need it because they are a) lazy, b) too stupid to manage even the simplest of a job, c) socially maladjusted or d) physically crippled.
Charities will take care of the type d, but it's absurd to say that anything should be paid to types a-c.
Well, taking care of those who fall under type d can fall to charities, but generally, I don't have a problem seeing someone who is actually incapable of the work receiving some kind of assistance, especially if they ended up being injured or whatever because of their jobs, and most particularly if it was while in some kind of service (Military, Police, Fire, etc)
Types a-c already gets plenty of assistance. The federal government employs a lot of them.
Everybody should immediatly be very, very suspicious of this bill if that's the case.
That was my first thought too. I've seen some of the stuff Microsoft has been granted patents for, and a lot of it is stuff that's been used by many others for a long time.
The only thing I can think of is that Microsoft, Oracle, and probably several other companies are trying to get software patents in through the back door, then go and sue everyone who uses anything remotely similar in open source, GPL, shareware, or freeware.
But then again, I frequently cast a doubting eye on anything the government calls "reform."
It seems to me that Microsoft is only playing catch up, has invention died over in Redmond?
You're assuming that they ever had the ability to innovate there.
DOS was bought for them and given to them. Windows is because of Xerox PARC and because Jobs never believed Gates would decompile the Macs. IE was based on Mosaic and Netscape. The Office suite comes from any number of word processors, Lotus 1-2-3, and Harvard Graphics. SQL Server was based on Sybase (they had a joint venture for a while).
They have always been playing catch up out there, because when a product gets popular in-house and/or elsewhere, they have to try to make their own version of it.
I guess you never check your web server or other security logs and see where those IP addresses originate. I've found far too many of them governed by APNIC, with a chunk of those coming from China.
Actually, through that icon, you can also access any network-mounted drives... they're just trying to say, "look what's attached to me through this one."
Is bloat really a problem with too many features or more to do with bad coding?
Actually, it's a bit of both.
Programs that have more features than you'll ever truly use could be considered "bloated." If they were modular features, then you could choose to install or not, and the program size would be appropriate for what you do. This, of course, means there must be a good, solid underlying design of whatever it is.
Poor programming practices lead to bloat too. This goes back to the old program optimization and efficiency argument. Adding more memory and a faster CPU only masks the true problem... bad program design and poor programming practices. By cleaning up and doing some basic forms of optimization, you can reduce this kind of bloat.
Unfortunately, governments (at least here in the US) tend to operate on a "How much is it going to cost right now?" They don't always think about how much it will cost to redo/rebuild/replace it five years from now.
You're asking for a lot to have the government to say, "Let's take the bid that gives us the best bang for our buck," instead of, "Ah, this is the lowest bid."
like Dr Who of when I was a kid and where watching the 60's reruns. Its campy and funny and ejoyable and a real family show. I know a lot of people where hoping for it to be remade but its not they are making this to be just like the old shows minus the cardbord and celophane sets.
The cheesy special effects was part of what made the series so much fun. Extremly obvious fake stuff, seeing all the wires, etc... it's good to know that it's going to be more like a continuation of the series that was put on indefinite hiatus back in 1989 than some kind of, "let's start from the beginning again" remake. Gives me a warm fuzzy...
There were a few hot babes in it, but they never dressed like Wilma Deering, so that wasn't good enough of a draw.
No... instead they had Leela... who, apparently, was a HUGE draw when Doctor Who and one of the Football leagues were on the air in adjacent time slots.
A lot of these campaign reform and regulation laws are very subtly or rather blatantly designed to make it much easier for incumbents to get reelected.
They're trying to prevent a candidate's opponents... especially non-major party candidates... from having any kind of impact on their reelection.
By it's very definition, the first amendment protects political speech. It is fool hardy to believe that it is appropriate to prevent someone blogging from posting a link to a contribution site.
Tell that to Senators McCain and Feingold, and their attempted Incumbent Protection Act, er, Campaign Finance Reform. (Inability to talk about the incumbent's record within 60 days of the election.)
Should you not be allowed to dontate to whom you choose?
One would hope so.
What about Foreign web servers?
Unenforcable without permission from the owners of the web sites, the various national governments, etc.
Who is going to filter this?
Symantec? (Library filtering software they mentioned here a while back.) Some other company? Who knows. I would think this would be generally unenforcable from a legal standpoint... not that the government won't try.
If it is not filtered, then which one of the thousands of people will be fined, and how would the FCC draw the line on this.
Ooooo.... money... draw a line? Why? It's up to the people to stop this one.
My friends, welcome to another slippery slope.
It just seems like yet another speed-up point on the much larger slope we've been on for a long time.
Yes. You should've held on, but been actively looking. For whatever reason, business logic is, "We'll wait 2-3 weeks for the person who has a job instead of hiring the person who's available immediately because they're out of work."
It doesn't matter which, overall... it's what I develop under... it's what I've been developing under... it's got all the tools I need, including publishing stuff, if you speak nroff/troff, tbl, eqn, and pic.
I don't know how many times I've used a whiteboard to just diagram, erase, list, or whatever. Extremely useful tool, and when it's done, you have a picture you can translate into a design document.
... users didn't have to be members of the Administrator group. Then the system files would be somewhat more protected in that the user wouldn't have write privileges. I'm not saying the issue goes away entirely... just that unless what you are running requires some kind of administrator/superuser privileges, you can contain damage to the process at hand.
You are quite right, however, in that buffer overflow is a result of careless programming. Making assumptions about length of strings is fine if you're in a purely academic setting and under time constratints to get your programming assignments done... besides, your professors usually will tell you that it's fine. I do wish, however, they'd emphasize that while it's fine in a controlled environment, in the real world, you have to provide for checks against buffer lengths, etc.
C is still used for a lot of things because of its flexibility. Yes, you can very easily shoot yourself in the foot, but with the flexibility and power comes greater responsibility... which means anyone who uses it needs to be vigilant, always expecting the unexpected.
UDP is connectionless, where TCP is connection-oriented. That's a completely different issue altogether. If you use UDP, your application has to have the quality of service stuff in it. TCP takes care of some of that.
Both USB and IEEE 1394 have some kind of error correction built in along with some form of expected level of service, so they're both like TCP.
You get a different box for each of the following:
monitor
main case
keyboard
mouse (sometimes)
Even when you buy it as a "package deal." Components come in different boxes. It's no different. And as someone said previously, you could even make it so that you can buy the iPod without having to buy the connectors (maybe you're replacing or adding an additional), and don't need all the connection hardware.
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Have you ever worked at a company where they have an "authorized list" of software? One that includes browsers other than IE? No? OK, I have. I have had to produce internal use only pages that support IE and Mozilla... in that short time span you speak of. Testing wasn't such a big deal. Run it in Mozilla. If it works, the HTML isn't broken. Then run it in IE and test your JavaScript, because of the event-handling differences.
What are you going to do if they give you a requirement to do it in that short, one week period to have it run on IE, Mozilla, Netscape, and Firefox? Hmm? You're going to sit there and not be able to deliver, because you have people who work for you who can't think outside of the box, since all you ever did in the past was design one-sided applications.
The problem arises when you depend on proprietary extensions.
Also, based on your argument, what do you consider an acceptable loss from potential sales revenue? Do you consider excluding 10% of the market to be acceptable? What if that 10% had a large chunk of disposable income and would be more likely to buy your product? Just because the "majority" uses IE doesn't mean it's right to exclude the minority who choose not to or cannot.
If anyone's being moronic, it's you.
That's not entirely true. There are some sites on the web that will sell you PCs with some form of Linux pre-installed.
However, I did just recently have a polite version of "Fuck you" fight with HP Shopping. I wanted a laptop with a hard drive partitioned to my specifications. "No, we don't do that." So I asked if they'd sell me the laptop without Windows XP installed, yet ship the installation media, since it was included in the price. "No, because our contractual obligations require that we sell it with the latest version of Microsoft Windows installed."
I informed them that they lost the sale. All I wanted was a system I could dual-boot, and not have to deal with the hassle of having to burn the installation media (they put it on a partition on the hard drive you cannot access except through the Windows installation programs), repartition the hard drive, and reinstall the system.
They apologized for their web site not serving my needs and would pass it on to the appropriate people. I replied with a simple, "It's not about your web site. It's about someone sitting there, running FDISK, and watching an installation happen instead of applying the standard ghosted image." Even said I'd have been willing to wait a couple of extra weeks for the system.
The big houses apparently are not interested in knowledgable computer users. They only want the uneducated masses.
Even on my cell phone, I get some calls that are reported as not having an ID, but those are either friends who have something weird about their phone lines (VoIP stuff, sometimes), or are companies I already deal with calling me back about something I sent in an inquiry about.
Only because caller ID allows telemarketers and the like to come up as UNAVAILABLE. If they had to show an actual number where, when you dial it back, you get a person (probably at his or her home), caller ID would succeed wonderfully. Those telemarketers would receive plenty of callbacks when they're trying to sleep, eat, or might otherwise be involved in some kind of recreational activity. The phone company claims it's because they're behind their own PBX and don't transmit caller ID data. Well, they should at least know who owns the PBX, and could give you a main number for that company, saying that anything coming from there shows up as TELEMRKT CO 555-555-1212.
Someone will figure out a way to get some string past the Sender ID check (or most checks, for that matter). All that use of something like this will do is slow down the spammers for a short while. They'll figure out ways around it.
Charities will take care of the type d, but it's absurd to say that anything should be paid to types a-c.
Well, taking care of those who fall under type d can fall to charities, but generally, I don't have a problem seeing someone who is actually incapable of the work receiving some kind of assistance, especially if they ended up being injured or whatever because of their jobs, and most particularly if it was while in some kind of service (Military, Police, Fire, etc)
Types a-c already gets plenty of assistance. The federal government employs a lot of them.
That was my first thought too. I've seen some of the stuff Microsoft has been granted patents for, and a lot of it is stuff that's been used by many others for a long time.
The only thing I can think of is that Microsoft, Oracle, and probably several other companies are trying to get software patents in through the back door, then go and sue everyone who uses anything remotely similar in open source, GPL, shareware, or freeware.
But then again, I frequently cast a doubting eye on anything the government calls "reform."
You're assuming that they ever had the ability to innovate there.
DOS was bought for them and given to them. Windows is because of Xerox PARC and because Jobs never believed Gates would decompile the Macs. IE was based on Mosaic and Netscape. The Office suite comes from any number of word processors, Lotus 1-2-3, and Harvard Graphics. SQL Server was based on Sybase (they had a joint venture for a while).
They have always been playing catch up out there, because when a product gets popular in-house and/or elsewhere, they have to try to make their own version of it.
I'm not holding my breath, though, because despite all that, China actually likes to sell all the bandwidth it can. They want money too.
The prefix should've probably always read "MS's" anyway.
Carefully read your EULA. You'll find some wording in it that actually puts it that way, too... or at least really makes a strong case for it.
Ah yes... "I can't be responsible for my actions when the end result is something bad. I can only be responsible for things that went well."
That kind of drivel makes people who think logically become extremely cynical.
Actually, it's a bit of both.
Programs that have more features than you'll ever truly use could be considered "bloated." If they were modular features, then you could choose to install or not, and the program size would be appropriate for what you do. This, of course, means there must be a good, solid underlying design of whatever it is.
Poor programming practices lead to bloat too. This goes back to the old program optimization and efficiency argument. Adding more memory and a faster CPU only masks the true problem... bad program design and poor programming practices. By cleaning up and doing some basic forms of optimization, you can reduce this kind of bloat.
You're asking for a lot to have the government to say, "Let's take the bid that gives us the best bang for our buck," instead of, "Ah, this is the lowest bid."
The cheesy special effects was part of what made the series so much fun. Extremly obvious fake stuff, seeing all the wires, etc... it's good to know that it's going to be more like a continuation of the series that was put on indefinite hiatus back in 1989 than some kind of, "let's start from the beginning again" remake. Gives me a warm fuzzy...
No... instead they had Leela... who, apparently, was a HUGE draw when Doctor Who and one of the Football leagues were on the air in adjacent time slots.
They're trying to prevent a candidate's opponents... especially non-major party candidates... from having any kind of impact on their reelection.
By it's very definition, the first amendment protects political speech. It is fool hardy to believe that it is appropriate to prevent someone blogging from posting a link to a contribution site.
Tell that to Senators McCain and Feingold, and their attempted Incumbent Protection Act, er, Campaign Finance Reform. (Inability to talk about the incumbent's record within 60 days of the election.)
Should you not be allowed to dontate to whom you choose?
One would hope so.
What about Foreign web servers?
Unenforcable without permission from the owners of the web sites, the various national governments, etc.
Who is going to filter this?
Symantec? (Library filtering software they mentioned here a while back.) Some other company? Who knows. I would think this would be generally unenforcable from a legal standpoint... not that the government won't try.
If it is not filtered, then which one of the thousands of people will be fined, and how would the FCC draw the line on this.
Ooooo.... money... draw a line? Why? It's up to the people to stop this one.
My friends, welcome to another slippery slope.
It just seems like yet another speed-up point on the much larger slope we've been on for a long time.
I don't know how many times I've used a whiteboard to just diagram, erase, list, or whatever. Extremely useful tool, and when it's done, you have a picture you can translate into a design document.
Honestly, this is old news. I remember the story being out there over a year ago.
You are quite right, however, in that buffer overflow is a result of careless programming. Making assumptions about length of strings is fine if you're in a purely academic setting and under time constratints to get your programming assignments done... besides, your professors usually will tell you that it's fine. I do wish, however, they'd emphasize that while it's fine in a controlled environment, in the real world, you have to provide for checks against buffer lengths, etc.
C is still used for a lot of things because of its flexibility. Yes, you can very easily shoot yourself in the foot, but with the flexibility and power comes greater responsibility... which means anyone who uses it needs to be vigilant, always expecting the unexpected.
Both USB and IEEE 1394 have some kind of error correction built in along with some form of expected level of service, so they're both like TCP.
You get a different box for each of the following:
- monitor
- main case
- keyboard
- mouse (sometimes)
Even when you buy it as a "package deal." Components come in different boxes. It's no different. And as someone said previously, you could even make it so that you can buy the iPod without having to buy the connectors (maybe you're replacing or adding an additional), and don't need all the connection hardware.