I don't use it often enough to bother googling, because I only test our stuff on it, but thanks anyway.
Exactly the problem: for us casual users, not finding the feature and not caring enough to look will just drive us away, because we already have 2 or 3 main browsers anyway. GP's "quit your whining" is the equivalent to RTFM. I don't RTFM when I buy a new car... I don't see a reason to keep a new car so blatantly different it makes me RTFM to use standard-but-hidden features. That's the problem with ribbons; you don't even know if the feature you're looking for is actually supported and just very, very well hidden. You quit in disgust.
More screen real estate. With the small screened netbooks being all the rage, that menu bar does make a difference.
You're right, but they're wrong in doing this. Netbooks are a very small percentage, and therefore niche. You DO NOT force a majority to conform to the minority problems, or we would all browse in 'mobile' versions of websites with no flash support.
What they need to do is offer two installers and leave us "majorities" alone. Or at least have an installer that chooses the right option. More work for them? Still didn't keep microsoft from selling 7 versions of Windows Vista, and doesn't keep Yahoo from having a "Classic" version, or countless other sites with graphics and text versions. Netbooks are hot, but I smell a fad more than a cost-cutting measure... an annoying standard as useful and disruptive as those windows programs that minimize to your windows tray as an icon when you tell them to exit, forcing you to always take an extra step to do your bidding.
People are at a loss when the latest forced update kills a bunch of their extensions. There is no way to undo the version change as a limited user. It's also a pain to download an old extension if you come to a friend's already updated PC. Waiting for extension devs to "update" the extensions is sometimes like waiting for Godot... risky business. Mozilla's addon site forces your browser to ignore extensions whose version number is below developer mandates, putting the onus on devs to constantly update version ID's in their extensions, and leaving us in the dust if the dev gets tired of this.
There is a benefit to running in Windows' limited rights mode: without a listening daemon with rights escalation, companies can't allow their executable to mae changes to my system. When I install Google Earth / Chrome, or Safari / iTunes, I always disable their auto-update daemons by running services.msc as an admin. Take advantage of this when Firefox joins the bandwagon.
My beef with firefox started around 2.0 when I realized that backward compatibility with extensions wasn't guaranteed. Extensions cannot be even downloaded when your browser is off by 0.0.1 from Mozilla's "safety" numbers, which happens if you are inadvertently updated --FF4 wants to push those updates more freely and break my setup overnight, if they continue to deny me the chance to define which extensions I can and cannot download --I'll continue to fake my browser string so I can download them, and Nightly Tester so I can "force the install." What bothers me on FF4 is that they're removing the menu bar, other sane browsers used by the geek-free mainstream, like Opera and Safari have been shy of that move.
Adblock can be somewhat emulated by with a 0.0.0.0 entries on your hostsfile, and plugins can be disabled if I don't feel like watching flash videos. Youtube has some HTML5 support anyway. I will check up on FF's Minefield beta only till FF 3.7 "gold" spawns from it. I currently benefit from the beta's speedier tab multiprocessing. When Safari or Opera start offering this FF beta benefit, I'm gone.
I made this post on the widescreen problem yesterday touching on forced format pushes.
Sounds like us 4:3 supporters are in the minority even within the walls of slashdot. Geeks incorrectly gauge the spread of 16:9 not from mainstream TV availability (many/.'ers timeshift series and don't watch daytime TV off the major networks.) Instead, our geeks seem to follow the logic that if most of our SCI-FI or HBO shows in our piratebay or DVR come in HD, then the other shows must be taped in HD. Most HD implies 16:9, and people have assumed from the above that 4:3 is then irrelevant even under PC's that ain't cable-ready.
This ignores how we subsidize the cable-only networks taping hit shows by paying subscription premiums. The reality is that bad logic and greed forces us to enjoy HD hardware that little content catered to it. Youtube, facebook and twitter don't need widescreens, and most people don't watch DVD's on their PC when a TV is there. I still am aggravated that a minority niche forced 16:9 to be a standard everywhere instead of forcing THEM to find the unsavory screens we all now have.
Allow me to expand on that. It's sad that just digital SD and not full HDTV is the only "mandated" standard when both could have been forced given a couple more years to allow for larger HDTV penetration.
There are problems with this idea. First, what about old content that is in 4:3? Either you accept the black bars, stretch it, or crop it to 16:9. [...] Are you going to legally force them to literally refilm Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Let the market sort it out. People like you who care about stuff like this can buy your TV connection from a company that also cares.
You misunderstood this part. Even now most networks aren't filming in HD beyond a few daily "choice" shows, and you read that in my post. Getting real, I don't care about refilming, just like nobody demanded black-and-white classic films to be refilmed for color. The problem is exactly that formats laxly regulated coexist too well thanks to stretching: the new tech the industry is forcing us all to purchase, is nearly useless because producers don't care that we all have HD TV's, and carriers only care that they can charge separately for the privilege of using said forced tech. The market's "sorting it out" will cost an even larger dollar the day cablecos toss out all SD channels so they can charge full price for essensially artificial inflation of HD. They won't normalize prices to pre-HD days.
Now, my problem with increasing frequencies is the high power reqs and loss of penetration through walls. This only exacerbates our currently unfixed wireless problems. The promissed transfer rates of wireless mean nothing when you aren't in near-lab conditions... I have a myriad of problems even though my laptop is about between 2 and 10 feet away from the AP.
Linux media players (Ubuntu, Centos and Mandriva) on Gnome and KDE play remote files OK in a burpless wired connection, but crash infinitely more than Windows over wireless. On any OS anywhere I've been, file copy experiences over wireless suck at a/b/g or n speeds, and any 5000+ file copy will be interrupted several times. "copy command" operations are a pain because there's no "interrupted over wireless time, please continue exactly where you left" AFAIK. I just mv files in order to know exactly which files are left on the obligatory Samba disconnects.
Unknown wireless interference frequently drops all channels every couple hours where I live... wireless reauthentication kills your movie session as the media players crash, or automatically return to index 0:00:00 without tagging where your movie was. You'll have to guess where the movie stopped and possibly overshoot the mark as well.
Back on topic, better file speeds are only good if you have single huge files that you can suck in before your next disconnect. N speeds are rarely at their max now, and I don't think 7Gbps will be a breakthrough in penetration and stability. A, G and N haven't fixed stability yet, and these guys said nothing about robustness. The SMB protocol needs better built-in drop recovery as well. Something more like transparent flash video buffering and metadata on last-opened file and seek position would be welcome.
Last I checked, the FCC only mandated the switch to digital over the air and had nothing to say what format was broadcast over private networks. That decision is just based on greed. (more free bandwidth and more converter box rental fees.)
Allow me to expand on that. It's sad that just digital SD and not full HDTV is the only "mandated" standard when both could have been forced given a couple more years to allow for larger HDTV penetration. Forced unavailability of old 4:3 on the PC and LCD industry was more effective to force us all to a 16:9. These wider but shorter screens are little more than paperweights when you consider that larger compression-based distortion and forced resolution stretches are more obvious on them than our old TV's... we have almost no programming to use the technology we purchased. Over the air HD is hit or miss, and most people continue to use cable because lots of the new OtA power transmitters suck.
I want cablecos to explain what my bill will look like the day Standard Definition gets truly "deprecated." It should force them to remove all those duplicate non-HD channels, or upgrade my free channels to their currently payfor HD clones at no extra cost --I seriously doubt the latter will be taken, but they can't justify pulling the plug like the US government did to analog TV across the country in June 2009.
Years after first generation HDTV sets have arrived in stores and reached to reasonable prices, networks still do not transmit in HD even 1/2 of their programming (I'm not talking 10 year old classics, but stuff recorded recently on what should be all HD cameras by now.) Weekend sports and local news are HD in many channels, but makes up for only a few weekly hours in our 24*7 blocks. While all the 9-to-5 worker drones are too busy to notice, networks are chugging along at the same old cheap non-HD resolutions until the weekend fake-out. Whatever non-basic HD is out there comes at a premium price. The two big networks for Spanish-only immigrants have even less total HD programming. Cable-subsized television for local community programming has 0 HD programs even in New York city. With no HD deadline in sight, it seems we were all duped by LCD-manufacturers and cablecos. Our second generation HD LCD sets will have undergone slow pixel death by natural dimming before governments force all cameras in every local HD program to actually transmit in HD. meanwhile, it's cries from distortion and previously unnecessary stretching for all of us.
Tried from IE 8 (freshly installed yesterday) and was asked to get flash. It appears they're still transitioning their site and haven't sanitized their links going to the "bad" format.
It seems going straight to www.scribd.com and clicking on the "titular" document there failed.I couldn't find any direct link from TFA, so I can't see where other posters got the working link.
for languages that I cannot even pronounce, let alone read or write? [...] I can fake my way enough in english, french, german, and spanish to get along, thanks.
Don't be shy, aboot it, chap. "Canadian English" is a fine first language, eh?;)
then there is the bizarre phenomenon of paleolithic tech that gets born in the usa, and mostly forgotten there, but continues to live on in other areas
Like our original non-validating, unicode-incompatible slashcode board?;) *ducks at thrown shoes*
Google Chrome 4.1 prerenders it if you COPY and paste into an address bar, but only as a suggestion and not on the bar itself. When the page loads, the address bar remains in ascii goobledygook. Minefield 3.7a1 behaves just like Chrome. Safari 4.0.4 (greatly ironic version #) renders on the address bar only after it loads the page. IE6 does nothing before or after.
I got a better one. www.bankofamerica.com. See, I used Unicode character 212e instead of the e. Looks the same to most people, and would probably fool quite a bit of people.
It's a few points taller than an "e" plus some vertical padding on either side of the letter. At normal tooltip or status bar sizes it would be nearly impossible to tell appart from a sucky font even if you were looking for it... guess that's the point.
To see the character itself under Windows:
Start \ Run \ charmap.exe
Scroll down about two thirds of the way and it's on the righthand side, right before those mysterious 1/3 2/3 1/8 and 1/8 signs. When you click on it, there's a zoomed view with the Unicode #. I don't know how to write it in Windows, though.
Can anyone tell me why someone wouldn't want the.xxx domain to happen? What possible downside is there to it?
For starters, having to re-register your legitimately and costly-obtained.com domains to ensure that your brand remains un-diluted. Think of what confusion and money loss would exist if playboy.com and playboy.xxx are owned by different companies? Think of whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.com back when the latter was a pornsite.
But the purpose is to allow companies who failed to grab a "good" domainname to try again this time, and legally get it. And no matter who gets the domain first, registrars will NOT sell playboy.xxx for cheap due to brand recognition. Worse yet, xxx doesn't exist, and any blocking will mean further costs to provide for blocking at your firewal or home PC level. And playboy.com won't shut down even if they simultaneously buy the.xxx domain, so think about duplicating rules and having pornsites potentially double nearly overnight. Remember also that lots of spyware comes from fake pornsites, and your anti-spyware may not protect against evil new xxx infection sites quickly enough while that happens. Now think about all this, and weep:)
The best example of this was in Red Dwarf: Return to Earth. They zoomed in on a business card, then zoomed back out. Found a reflection behind the people in the picture, enhanced the reflection, then found a water droplet on a telephone pole, enhanced the reflection from that, and THEN they used a window seen in the reflection on the water droplet to see the back of the card. Then, they flipped the image...all so they could read the address on the back of the card.
It was fsking epic.
Seems just like the steroids version of a much earlier scene in Will Smith's Enemy of State. The scene shows a single still pic showing a suspect with a shopping bag. Some computer magic allowed the "camera" to fly around matrix like and display the bag's logo. The logo was behind, and here they had no mirrors or water droplets, IIRC. They just had a 3D effect to put the camera "behind" the people photographed.
This technology misunderstanding is just like having hypnosis performed on you so you can "go back in time" and get to receive an answer from someone you briefly encountered... no data because a question was never originally asked back then means no answer data in the present, any way you look at it. Unless quantum physics allows you to freaking change timelines without moving a finger.
Similarly, I think that if speech recognition ever becomes genuinely useful, it'll be because somebody gave up trying to make a computer understand English (which not even a human can do 100% correctly!), and instead tried to make computer-understandable-english. I'm imagining special characters stated with whistles and clicks. All commands defined in terms of phonemes instead of defining them in terms of written statements and attempting to recognise indirectly. Lots of short, 1-2 syllable non-words used for commands.
Years ago I used viavoice on Warp4, and it had a pretty decend recognitation rate..
Looks like whatever you're using now ain't quite as good.
<Big tangent ahead>
I tend to see the same issue on live TV. Apparently closed captioning in the US is a mixture of a speech recognition engine sometimes supervised by someone who can make changes a couple seconds before you see a word just pronounced. 15 years ago, I used to think the TV set could figure out the words and transcribe them, but it's fairly obvious now when a sentence transcribed live and badly scrolls by, and the "corrector" pushes a few dashes and writes a new sentence on the next line, so that we can see it scroll and note the intended sounds.
It is still pretty amazing to watch live sports games and see very obscure non-game references to people's names be spelt properly on the first try. It's also kinda cool to watch something for an hour to realize that the captions aren't being corrected by a human at all, when you thought they were. A sentence like the GP's tends to slip by pretty often.
Movies and non-live TV usually seems proofed and even comes in fixed block layout, instead of a slightly delayed "speech recognized" stream of text.
Microsoft will be hard pressed to explain why it would choose to not completely support competing browsers with its web based applications such as Outlook Web Access and the like.
I think that on the contrary, they will casually point to their past behavior and say that other browsers "are inferior" because their technologies "cannot" be made to display their ActiveX-laced pages. Here we'll know that MS has forced users to get IE just to log into windowsupdate and hotmail, claiming "impossibility" in the past. The latter was tweaked to allow other browsers eventually, though I've seen it fail on Konqueror and other small-share free browsers. The good part is that given enough market pressure, MS changes some of their products to adapt. The bad part is that they make those adaptations very minor, like the EU-only browser ballot system. It is unfair that they're spending more money and development time supporting just a region of the world, but it seems MS crunched the numbers and found that it would cost them more in LOST revenue to fix the Windows platform worldwide to play fair without governments forcing them to.
It has been a while since I looked at it, but OWA did not offer full functionality to browsers other than MSIE. I don't know if that is still the case, but I suspect it is.
Yup. Even IE 6 has no problem with showing the OWA interface. Isn't it ironic? Firefox, Chrome and Safari under the OWA 2003 version worked in this "reduced" mode. Difference? I personally had trouble because of certain missing Search functions. What I didn't miss is the damn "new mail" popup OWA sends only to IE. It is downright annoying unnerving when your job involves distributed (casual) monitoring during high callcenter volumes.
Oh, it reminds me of Careerbuilder's random login ads. One of them says in a huge, green colored picture of a button "I understand I will be contacted by a representative of the university of phoenix." In a real pushbutton about 1/9 of the size below it is a subdued "No thanks" button.
I also second the article on sneaky defaults that subscribe you to mailing lists. Some allow your them to share info with third parties, send you mail or generally push updates to your friends that you never thought were pushable, and take 70 separate clicks to undo (looking at you, Yahoo Contacts thing)
Unscrupulous sites like pipl, spock, intellius, mylife, cogmap and "freestats.ws" crawled me without authorizion out of profiles that I have already hidden (not a facebook user btw.) My "name lastname" search proudly yielded only 3 results back in 2001. These days that is just a pipe dream. Removing the quotes my uncommon name pops up on similarly crawled results. Long-faded friendships resulted in people mentioning my first name in long-useless social sites once or twice total. Makes me cringe at what face-tagging could do if I were to join FB and Zucker were to disclose those names hits to google searches.
Once crawled, you can't sue companies to take you off their DB --their money comes on bulk and you don't have more lawyers than theirs.
Does anyone actually know someone whose problem was fixed by System Restore? I sure don't...
It's still a failure 10 years after its birth. It is really blood-boiling when you realize 10Gigs in your hard drive are storing garbage that you find to be failed "restore points." Two months ago, I tried restoring my XP machine. None of my safer saves worked. I did restore to just 1 week prior and fixed the bluescreens and netbios connection drops. My extended family has 6 months max Restore "coverage." The failure rate with SR for restore points overall is about 2 out of 3. I coun't failure as 'eventually restored but went through a bunch of other failed states that would have been better'. You'll use 3 or so old restore points and waste 20 or more minutes total.
When someone brings you their machine with "popups" they usually don't remember how far back you should restore. Worse yet, if they do but the infection goes back a full year. Your chance of success halves for every 30 extra days you move backwards.
Just a couple nights ago I got a driveby selfinstalling "scanware" on Vista. System Restore failed again, which annoyed more than it surprised me. If you'll excuse me, I'll be uploading my files and bookmarks for another couple days.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't use it often enough to bother googling, because I only test our stuff on it, but thanks anyway.
Exactly the problem: for us casual users, not finding the feature and not caring enough to look will just drive us away, because we already have 2 or 3 main browsers anyway. GP's "quit your whining" is the equivalent to RTFM. I don't RTFM when I buy a new car... I don't see a reason to keep a new car so blatantly different it makes me RTFM to use standard-but-hidden features. That's the problem with ribbons; you don't even know if the feature you're looking for is actually supported and just very, very well hidden. You quit in disgust.
More screen real estate. With the small screened netbooks being all the rage, that menu bar does make a difference.
You're right, but they're wrong in doing this. Netbooks are a very small percentage, and therefore niche. You DO NOT force a majority to conform to the minority problems, or we would all browse in 'mobile' versions of websites with no flash support.
What they need to do is offer two installers and leave us "majorities" alone. Or at least have an installer that chooses the right option. More work for them? Still didn't keep microsoft from selling 7 versions of Windows Vista, and doesn't keep Yahoo from having a "Classic" version, or countless other sites with graphics and text versions. Netbooks are hot, but I smell a fad more than a cost-cutting measure... an annoying standard as useful and disruptive as those windows programs that minimize to your windows tray as an icon when you tell them to exit, forcing you to always take an extra step to do your bidding.
People are at a loss when the latest forced update kills a bunch of their extensions. There is no way to undo the version change as a limited user. It's also a pain to download an old extension if you come to a friend's already updated PC. Waiting for extension devs to "update" the extensions is sometimes like waiting for Godot... risky business. Mozilla's addon site forces your browser to ignore extensions whose version number is below developer mandates, putting the onus on devs to constantly update version ID's in their extensions, and leaving us in the dust if the dev gets tired of this.
There is a benefit to running in Windows' limited rights mode: without a listening daemon with rights escalation, companies can't allow their executable to mae changes to my system. When I install Google Earth / Chrome, or Safari / iTunes, I always disable their auto-update daemons by running services.msc as an admin. Take advantage of this when Firefox joins the bandwagon.
My beef with firefox started around 2.0 when I realized that backward compatibility with extensions wasn't guaranteed. Extensions cannot be even downloaded when your browser is off by 0.0.1 from Mozilla's "safety" numbers, which happens if you are inadvertently updated --FF4 wants to push those updates more freely and break my setup overnight, if they continue to deny me the chance to define which extensions I can and cannot download --I'll continue to fake my browser string so I can download them, and Nightly Tester so I can "force the install." What bothers me on FF4 is that they're removing the menu bar, other sane browsers used by the geek-free mainstream, like Opera and Safari have been shy of that move.
Adblock can be somewhat emulated by with a 0.0.0.0 entries on your hostsfile, and plugins can be disabled if I don't feel like watching flash videos. Youtube has some HTML5 support anyway. I will check up on FF's Minefield beta only till FF 3.7 "gold" spawns from it. I currently benefit from the beta's speedier tab multiprocessing. When Safari or Opera start offering this FF beta benefit, I'm gone.
I made this post on the widescreen problem yesterday touching on forced format pushes.
Sounds like us 4:3 supporters are in the minority even within the walls of slashdot. Geeks incorrectly gauge the spread of 16:9 not from mainstream TV availability (many /.'ers timeshift series and don't watch daytime TV off the major networks.) Instead, our geeks seem to follow the logic that if most of our SCI-FI or HBO shows in our piratebay or DVR come in HD, then the other shows must be taped in HD. Most HD implies 16:9, and people have assumed from the above that 4:3 is then irrelevant even under PC's that ain't cable-ready.
This ignores how we subsidize the cable-only networks taping hit shows by paying subscription premiums. The reality is that bad logic and greed forces us to enjoy HD hardware that little content catered to it. Youtube, facebook and twitter don't need widescreens, and most people don't watch DVD's on their PC when a TV is there. I still am aggravated that a minority niche forced 16:9 to be a standard everywhere instead of forcing THEM to find the unsavory screens we all now have.
Allow me to expand on that. It's sad that just digital SD and not full HDTV is the only "mandated" standard when both could have been forced given a couple more years to allow for larger HDTV penetration.
There are problems with this idea. First, what about old content that is in 4:3? Either you accept the black bars, stretch it, or crop it to 16:9. [...] Are you going to legally force them to literally refilm Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Let the market sort it out. People like you who care about stuff like this can buy your TV connection from a company that also cares.
You misunderstood this part. Even now most networks aren't filming in HD beyond a few daily "choice" shows, and you read that in my post. Getting real, I don't care about refilming, just like nobody demanded black-and-white classic films to be refilmed for color. The problem is exactly that formats laxly regulated coexist too well thanks to stretching: the new tech the industry is forcing us all to purchase, is nearly useless because producers don't care that we all have HD TV's, and carriers only care that they can charge separately for the privilege of using said forced tech.
The market's "sorting it out" will cost an even larger dollar the day cablecos toss out all SD channels so they can charge full price for essensially artificial inflation of HD. They won't normalize prices to pre-HD days.
Now, my problem with increasing frequencies is the high power reqs and loss of penetration through walls. This only exacerbates our currently unfixed wireless problems. The promissed transfer rates of wireless mean nothing when you aren't in near-lab conditions... I have a myriad of problems even though my laptop is about between 2 and 10 feet away from the AP.
Linux media players (Ubuntu, Centos and Mandriva) on Gnome and KDE play remote files OK in a burpless wired connection, but crash infinitely more than Windows over wireless. On any OS anywhere I've been, file copy experiences over wireless suck at a/b/g or n speeds, and any 5000+ file copy will be interrupted several times. "copy command" operations are a pain because there's no "interrupted over wireless time, please continue exactly where you left" AFAIK. I just mv files in order to know exactly which files are left on the obligatory Samba disconnects.
Unknown wireless interference frequently drops all channels every couple hours where I live... wireless reauthentication kills your movie session as the media players crash, or automatically return to index 0:00:00 without tagging where your movie was. You'll have to guess where the movie stopped and possibly overshoot the mark as well.
Back on topic, better file speeds are only good if you have single huge files that you can suck in before your next disconnect. N speeds are rarely at their max now, and I don't think 7Gbps will be a breakthrough in penetration and stability. A, G and N haven't fixed stability yet, and these guys said nothing about robustness. The SMB protocol needs better built-in drop recovery as well. Something more like transparent flash video buffering and metadata on last-opened file and seek position would be welcome.
Last I checked, the FCC only mandated the switch to digital over the air and had nothing to say what format was broadcast over private networks. That decision is just based on greed. (more free bandwidth and more converter box rental fees.)
Allow me to expand on that. It's sad that just digital SD and not full HDTV is the only "mandated" standard when both could have been forced given a couple more years to allow for larger HDTV penetration. Forced unavailability of old 4:3 on the PC and LCD industry was more effective to force us all to a 16:9. These wider but shorter screens are little more than paperweights when you consider that larger compression-based distortion and forced resolution stretches are more obvious on them than our old TV's... we have almost no programming to use the technology we purchased. Over the air HD is hit or miss, and most people continue to use cable because lots of the new OtA power transmitters suck.
I want cablecos to explain what my bill will look like the day Standard Definition gets truly "deprecated." It should force them to remove all those duplicate non-HD channels, or upgrade my free channels to their currently payfor HD clones at no extra cost --I seriously doubt the latter will be taken, but they can't justify pulling the plug like the US government did to analog TV across the country in June 2009.
Years after first generation HDTV sets have arrived in stores and reached to reasonable prices, networks still do not transmit in HD even 1/2 of their programming (I'm not talking 10 year old classics, but stuff recorded recently on what should be all HD cameras by now.) Weekend sports and local news are HD in many channels, but makes up for only a few weekly hours in our 24*7 blocks. While all the 9-to-5 worker drones are too busy to notice, networks are chugging along at the same old cheap non-HD resolutions until the weekend fake-out. Whatever non-basic HD is out there comes at a premium price. The two big networks for Spanish-only immigrants have even less total HD programming. Cable-subsized television for local community programming has 0 HD programs even in New York city. With no HD deadline in sight, it seems we were all duped by LCD-manufacturers and cablecos. Our second generation HD LCD sets will have undergone slow pixel death by natural dimming before governments force all cameras in every local HD program to actually transmit in HD. meanwhile, it's cries from distortion and previously unnecessary stretching for all of us.
Tried from IE 8 (freshly installed yesterday) and was asked to get flash. It appears they're still transitioning their site and haven't sanitized their links going to the "bad" format.
It seems going straight to www.scribd.com and clicking on the "titular" document there failed.I couldn't find any direct link from TFA, so I can't see where other posters got the working link.
Working link is http://www.scribd.com/documents/30964170/Scribd-in-HTML5
Broken link from scribe's site is http://www.scribd.com/doc/30964170/Scribd-in-HTML5
for languages that I cannot even pronounce, let alone read or write? [...] I can fake my way enough in english, french, german, and spanish to get along, thanks.
Don't be shy, aboot it, chap. "Canadian English" is a fine first language, eh? ;)
then there is the bizarre phenomenon of paleolithic tech that gets born in the usa, and mostly forgotten there, but continues to live on in other areas
Like our original non-validating, unicode-incompatible slashcode board? ;)
*ducks at thrown shoes*
On windows XP SP2...
Google Chrome 4.1 prerenders it if you COPY and paste into an address bar, but only as a suggestion and not on the bar itself. When the page loads, the address bar remains in ascii goobledygook.
Minefield 3.7a1 behaves just like Chrome.
Safari 4.0.4 (greatly ironic version #) renders on the address bar only after it loads the page.
IE6 does nothing before or after.
I got a better one. www.bankofamerica.com. See, I used Unicode character 212e instead of the e. Looks the same to most people, and would probably fool quite a bit of people.
It's a few points taller than an "e" plus some vertical padding on either side of the letter. At normal tooltip or status bar sizes it would be nearly impossible to tell appart from a sucky font even if you were looking for it... guess that's the point.
To see the character itself under Windows:
Start \ Run \ charmap.exe
Scroll down about two thirds of the way and it's on the righthand side, right before those mysterious 1/3 2/3 1/8 and 1/8 signs. When you click on it, there's a zoomed view with the Unicode #. I don't know how to write it in Windows, though.
Without net neutrality regulation, I fear that providers will have far too much power to censor content.
Binary usenet comes to mind. Alive for decades... gone on one company's whim that was greedily copied by everyone else's.
Can anyone tell me why someone wouldn't want the .xxx domain to happen? What possible downside is there to it?
For starters, having to re-register your legitimately and costly-obtained .com domains to ensure that your brand remains un-diluted. Think of what confusion and money loss would exist if playboy.com and playboy.xxx are owned by different companies? Think of whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.com back when the latter was a pornsite.
But the purpose is to allow companies who failed to grab a "good" domainname to try again this time, and legally get it. And no matter who gets the domain first, registrars will NOT sell playboy.xxx for cheap due to brand recognition. Worse yet, xxx doesn't exist, and any blocking will mean further costs to provide for blocking at your firewal or home PC level. And playboy.com won't shut down even if they simultaneously buy the .xxx domain, so think about duplicating rules and having pornsites potentially double nearly overnight. Remember also that lots of spyware comes from fake pornsites, and your anti-spyware may not protect against evil new xxx infection sites quickly enough while that happens. Now think about all this, and weep :)
The best example of this was in Red Dwarf: Return to Earth. They zoomed in on a business card, then zoomed back out. Found a reflection behind the people in the picture, enhanced the reflection, then found a water droplet on a telephone pole, enhanced the reflection from that, and THEN they used a window seen in the reflection on the water droplet to see the back of the card. Then, they flipped the image...all so they could read the address on the back of the card.
It was fsking epic.
Seems just like the steroids version of a much earlier scene in Will Smith's Enemy of State. The scene shows a single still pic showing a suspect with a shopping bag. Some computer magic allowed the "camera" to fly around matrix like and display the bag's logo. The logo was behind, and here they had no mirrors or water droplets, IIRC. They just had a 3D effect to put the camera "behind" the people photographed. This technology misunderstanding is just like having hypnosis performed on you so you can "go back in time" and get to receive an answer from someone you briefly encountered... no data because a question was never originally asked back then means no answer data in the present, any way you look at it. Unless quantum physics allows you to freaking change timelines without moving a finger.
Similarly, I think that if speech recognition ever becomes genuinely useful, it'll be because somebody gave up trying to make a computer understand English (which not even a human can do 100% correctly!), and instead tried to make computer-understandable-english. I'm imagining special characters stated with whistles and clicks. All commands defined in terms of phonemes instead of defining them in terms of written statements and attempting to recognise indirectly. Lots of short, 1-2 syllable non-words used for commands.
Poets are way ahead of you. Repeat after me:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash [...]
Years ago I used viavoice on Warp4, and it had a pretty decend recognitation rate ..
Looks like whatever you're using now ain't quite as good.
<Big tangent ahead>
I tend to see the same issue on live TV. Apparently closed captioning in the US is a mixture of a speech recognition engine sometimes supervised by someone who can make changes a couple seconds before you see a word just pronounced. 15 years ago, I used to think the TV set could figure out the words and transcribe them, but it's fairly obvious now when a sentence transcribed live and badly scrolls by, and the "corrector" pushes a few dashes and writes a new sentence on the next line, so that we can see it scroll and note the intended sounds. It is still pretty amazing to watch live sports games and see very obscure non-game references to people's names be spelt properly on the first try. It's also kinda cool to watch something for an hour to realize that the captions aren't being corrected by a human at all, when you thought they were. A sentence like the GP's tends to slip by pretty often. Movies and non-live TV usually seems proofed and even comes in fixed block layout, instead of a slightly delayed "speech recognized" stream of text.
Microsoft will be hard pressed to explain why it would choose to not completely support competing browsers with its web based applications such as Outlook Web Access and the like.
I think that on the contrary, they will casually point to their past behavior and say that other browsers "are inferior" because their technologies "cannot" be made to display their ActiveX-laced pages. Here we'll know that MS has forced users to get IE just to log into windowsupdate and hotmail, claiming "impossibility" in the past. The latter was tweaked to allow other browsers eventually, though I've seen it fail on Konqueror and other small-share free browsers. The good part is that given enough market pressure, MS changes some of their products to adapt. The bad part is that they make those adaptations very minor, like the EU-only browser ballot system. It is unfair that they're spending more money and development time supporting just a region of the world, but it seems MS crunched the numbers and found that it would cost them more in LOST revenue to fix the Windows platform worldwide to play fair without governments forcing them to.
It has been a while since I looked at it, but OWA did not offer full functionality to browsers other than MSIE. I don't know if that is still the case, but I suspect it is.
Yup. Even IE 6 has no problem with showing the OWA interface. Isn't it ironic? Firefox, Chrome and Safari under the OWA 2003 version worked in this "reduced" mode. Difference? I personally had trouble because of certain missing Search functions. What I didn't miss is the damn "new mail" popup OWA sends only to IE. It is downright annoying unnerving when your job involves distributed (casual) monitoring during high callcenter volumes.
Oh, it reminds me of Careerbuilder's random login ads. One of them says in a huge, green colored picture of a button "I understand I will be contacted by a representative of the university of phoenix." In a real pushbutton about 1/9 of the size below it is a subdued "No thanks" button. I also second the article on sneaky defaults that subscribe you to mailing lists. Some allow your them to share info with third parties, send you mail or generally push updates to your friends that you never thought were pushable, and take 70 separate clicks to undo (looking at you, Yahoo Contacts thing)
Unscrupulous sites like pipl, spock, intellius, mylife, cogmap and "freestats.ws" crawled me without authorizion out of profiles that I have already hidden (not a facebook user btw.) My "name lastname" search proudly yielded only 3 results back in 2001. These days that is just a pipe dream. Removing the quotes my uncommon name pops up on similarly crawled results. Long-faded friendships resulted in people mentioning my first name in long-useless social sites once or twice total. Makes me cringe at what face-tagging could do if I were to join FB and Zucker were to disclose those names hits to google searches.
Once crawled, you can't sue companies to take you off their DB --their money comes on bulk and you don't have more lawyers than theirs.
Its not your data any more. You published it online and lost any control you might have had over it. Sorry.
I found that my ISP's TOS said the same thing for their "free" limited webhosting. Think how dangerous a coding blog is under those conditions.
Does anyone actually know someone whose problem was fixed by System Restore? I sure don't...
It's still a failure 10 years after its birth. It is really blood-boiling when you realize 10Gigs in your hard drive are storing garbage that you find to be failed "restore points." Two months ago, I tried restoring my XP machine. None of my safer saves worked. I did restore to just 1 week prior and fixed the bluescreens and netbios connection drops. My extended family has 6 months max Restore "coverage." The failure rate with SR for restore points overall is about 2 out of 3. I coun't failure as 'eventually restored but went through a bunch of other failed states that would have been better'. You'll use 3 or so old restore points and waste 20 or more minutes total.
When someone brings you their machine with "popups" they usually don't remember how far back you should restore. Worse yet, if they do but the infection goes back a full year. Your chance of success halves for every 30 extra days you move backwards.
Just a couple nights ago I got a driveby selfinstalling "scanware" on Vista. System Restore failed again, which annoyed more than it surprised me. If you'll excuse me, I'll be uploading my files and bookmarks for another couple days.