I'm having trouble accepting that having the viewframe dimensions change based on whether or not there is a scrollbar is "bad design" on my part.
Designers have little control over how tall their content will render, and most leave it at "auto" as they should. Having browser specific properties to control how one single browser renders scroll bars is, IMHO, plain stupid.
If standards-compliant HTML and CSS is rendered such that using a percentile for a width value changes based on the content and not the size of the frame (because the content is, through no fault of anyone, changing the viewframe width), then this (IMHO) is a bug.
Anyway, this only backs up my point that we should be thinking about these things from a browsing perspective. The discussion degraded into what specific behaviour Moz should implement, not whether it was a good idea that equal relative widths were, in fact, not equal.
That is, I don't care how it was changed, all I knew is that the current behaviour ran contrary to the principle of least surprise. All that happened is that the people with the opinion and the pwoer decided it was not a bug, when it was not clear at all that this was the case.
I don't really care whether it is a "bug" or not (though I do consider it one). My objection is that there was obviously an issue with how Moz rendered widths which is not addressed in any meaningful way, standard or not.
Compare with the decision to reimplement <MARQUEE>; seems rather arbitrary.
How my favourite bug was turned into a feature is the best example I have of how easy it is to get off the track with big projects like this.
The bug got lost in several threads, flames and arguments about what IE does or does not do, until it was finally marked WONTFIX by a Mozilla demi-god. IMHO, they missed the point. There is a constant refrain in Bugzilla about whether something is "standard" or not.
From my experience, the argument about web standards is used to either fix or not fix something, depending on how someone feels about a problem.
Don't think it's a problem? don't fix it and say "it's not standard, so we won;t" or "it's not standard, but we break the standard everywhere where it makes sense". Some behaviour need changing? The same arguments apply.
I may be just whining here, but sometime I think the fact that Mozilla is a web browser is lost in the arguments. I still love Moz, but the fact that the right-margin jumps around on my otherwise fine HTML 4.x and CSS pages will always bother me.
Copying CDs is a right in some countries
on
BMG Stops Producing CDs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What burns my britches is that this decision is in direct contradiction with well-established consumer rights in some countries.
For instance, in Cananda, I have the right to make verbatim copies of any media I want, as long as I am the owner of the original and do not allow more than one copy to be used at the same time. I'm pretty sure that I could legally burn 10,000 copies of any BMG title and use them to shingle my roof if I so desired (I wouldn't, but I could).
I'm also pretty sure that BMG is not allowed to restrict these rights.
The problem is that even though we have these pretty strong consumer rights in Canada, interest in protecting these rights by the government has eroded to the point where it is just a funny funny joke.
Another problem I have is that I do not buy CDs at the "big" stores. I purchase from a local music dealer who I have a good relationship with. If it was HMV I'd just return the CD and say "it don't work". I don't give a shit if BMG isn't going to reimburse HMV, because I'll stand there and power pout until I get my fscking way. I won't feel so good about doing that to a smaller retailer.
This actually happened recently when I picked up the latest "Queens of the Stone Age" and the CD wouldn't mount in my iBook. I wasn't even ripping or burning it. I was fscking trying to listen to the CD at the coffee shop. No, we can't have that, so it locks up the iBook CDRom player so hard I have to reboot to read any CD. I want to return it, but I'd feel bad going back to this great music store I found.
If I was feeling paranoid, I'd suggest that this tactic also has the effect of hurting smaller retailers more, leaving BMG, HMV &etc. with an even bigger share of the CD retailer market.
Reading this article has reminded me how much people suck. Grumble. Bitch. Complain.
What interests me is that the Foo Fighters are pretty blase about the whole "stealing music" thing. Grohl has said more than once that he could care less.
Actually, it was more like a tongue-in-cheek "We're a punk band. Oh, don't copy our music. We wouldn't want that."
Music careers are built on getting music into the hands (ears?) of listeners. It's been said before, but this whole copy-protection thing is simply to protect the "rights" of the music companies to earn further profit. I guess someone has to pay for all that payola to radio stations.
Oh, wait. There is only one radio station now. "C-c-c-clone Radio. All the same, all the time!"
I knew a guy who was involved in some of the initial meetings, but really don't know much beyond that. Basically, it means getting a wireless access point and letting people use your network (or a segment, anyway). Or something. I'm short on the details.
Try this for more info: planning@waterloowireless.org
I know this has been mentioned in another post, but apropros of this article, the Waterloo Wireless group is (or was, I haven't heard from them in some time) trying for complete world domination at 11Mbit/sec.
I personally think that Tim Horton's (for those of you who need a reference, Timmies is like Krispy Kreme without all the ambience) should go all Starbuck's on us and implement wireless access points in their coffee shops. Well, at least around the University of Waterloo, anyway.
So... How hard is it to become a Canadian these days?;)
Seriously, much too hard. I know a couple (he is Canadian, she is Swedish) who married and wanted to have her come over and become a citizen. The hoops they had to jump through were ridiculous.
I suppose it makes sense to someone, but it seemed pretty arbitrary. She was gainfully employed, spoke several languages, university educated, and they still gave her a hard time. They asked a lot of very personal questions, and ones they _can't_ ask once you are a citizen. They made him sign some crazy paper about how he was legally bound to support her, and could go to jail if she broke the law. I suppose this only proves that Immigration Canada is being fair, as she wasn't a member of any visible minority.
Canada is built on immigration from other countries. Both the US and Canada would have negative population rates unless we accepted people from elsewhere.
That being said, all my American friends who moved here to become Canadians did so with a concious choice to no longer live in the US (all for various reasons). This is not a dig, but a personal observation.
Everyone thinks their country/city/club is the best. Canada is great! Don't believe all you hear on Southpark;)
Um, no. I personally own everything I've ripped, and in Canada it is a consumer right to make as many damn personal copies for whatever reason I want. As long as I keep the original and all copies (or destroy all copies), and do not allow more then one copy to be used at the same time, I am breaking no law.
As for quality? Well, there are good rips and bad rips and some formats seem to be better at some bitrates than others, depending on the source. The real fact is that every single one of the lossy compression formats throw away data to get the total sampled size down.
The main application for these lossy digital audio formats are convenience and media flexibility. With any of these formats data fidelity is, by definition, of lesser importance.
You better believe it. The development work to make yet another port is pretty easy (except for the OS/390 -- that was especially fun) but the QA is crazy.
Well, we do have a chunk of native code that the Java hangs off of, but that is very POSIX, so we usually don't run into problems there.
...and yet we still get idiots whining about completely useless crap like this monk3yboyCRAP...
I posted a reply about the 8Gb limit for the OpenBSD boot partition in, not the original posting. You might want to re-read the thread. This time, take a moment to read the words contained therein. They contain ideas. Some ideas require you to think.
I already pointed out that most folks use OBSD as an edge server, and that the 8Gb limit is not so important for the intended audience. See point #1.
You are an idiot. Yet another clueless AC.
I hate it when I get all testy. I get modded down.
In my experience, if you provide an ISO, nobody buys a CD, and they just burn the ISO. With OBSD, at least one person buys a CD, and all his/her friends copy that.
This helps OBSD make exactly one sale, instead of none.
Seriously, I don't know. There isn't much incentive to buy OpenBSD CD sets (or any free OS, for that matter) in the first place. Giving the CDs away is just not going to help that, if you ask me.
Then again, I've bought few CD sets myself; I usually just get a few t-shirts and install via FTP and/or create my own ISO.
Well, this is a hardship only because you want to dual-boot, I'm guessing. Otherwise, you just partition and mount so that / is on the first 8Gb slice.
There are third-party boot managers that do magic to allow booting to happen from almost anywhere, for almost any OS. I don't know if it works with OBSD or not.
I've only run OBSD stand-alone on headless edge boxes, so I've never worried my pretty little head about the 8Gb limit. I'm assuming most folks who pay for the CDs every 6 months or so feel the same way. Well, that and the stickers. The stickers rule.
It's pretty common to run a few releases back on important and complex daemons like BIND, or Sendmail.
There is little value in going to BIND 8 or 9 if it has not been audited by the OBSD team first. BIND 4 is well understood and the faults, warts and bugs are well-known. BIND 8 is still new enough that it is considered an unknown.
This is one of the downsides (if you consider it a downsid) of trying to be "secure by design".
Of course, OBSD is free, as in beer and as in speech. This means you can run a parallel box with BIND 8 or 9 (or whatever) yourelf until you deem it safe. The responsibility is now yours to maintain security on that chunk of the OS, but everything is a trade-off, especially in host security.
BIND 8/9 will eventually make it into a future release. 99% of us do not need it, however, and so having a well-known and secure BIND 4 implementation has more value for the rest of us.
For a while there I wasn't sure they'd ever get another release out...
This puzzled me. I've been running an OBSD router since 2.6 (and we've been running it at work since 2.8). The releases have been coming out pretty much every 6 months, haven't they?
I upgrade about once a year, so I often skip releases, but I think they've only missed the release dates a few times, and only by a week or so.
Bugs will be found, which (of course) is the point of the OBSD project. I just don't see any shame in that. Lot's of organizations get compromised. The real test is how the organization reacts and recovers.
*shrug* From my POV, the releases have been getting better and better. I can't imagine running anything else as an edge box.
Of course, I may be wrong. Even openbsd.org runs Solaris!
Java 1.3 is not "production" ready on any BSD, AFAIK. I've looked into this quite a bit, and even ported an app to FreeBSD.
They have recently been blessed by Sun to provide a native version of the JDK (the previous versions ran in linux_compat mode), but it is not considered production-ready by the developers.
Our customer threw caution to the wind, and has been running our app for a year or so now on FreeBSD. So far, so good. We _did_ QA it. Sheesh.
OpenBSD Java support is still (again, AFAIK)) a tweakers domain. If you need official J2EE, go with Linux (or one of those "others").
...is OpenBSD recommended as an internet server over all of the other distros?
Depends who you talk to;)
A good place to start is here, to find out what the intentions of the OBSD project are. Then check out the OpenBSD Journal to see what people do with it.
My two cents: OBSD really shines as a secure inet server. Things like httpd, sshd, firewalling, bridging, routing. People do use it as a desktop, but IMHO it is not as desktop-friendly as FreeBSD. *shrug* I run it basically headless, as does everyone I know.
Then again, a cutting-edge desktop system is not a primary concern of the OBSD project.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm having trouble accepting that having the viewframe dimensions change based on whether or not there is a scrollbar is "bad design" on my part.
Designers have little control over how tall their content will render, and most leave it at "auto" as they should. Having browser specific properties to control how one single browser renders scroll bars is, IMHO, plain stupid.
If standards-compliant HTML and CSS is rendered such that using a percentile for a width value changes based on the content and not the size of the frame (because the content is, through no fault of anyone, changing the viewframe width), then this (IMHO) is a bug.
Anyway, this only backs up my point that we should be thinking about these things from a browsing perspective. The discussion degraded into what specific behaviour Moz should implement, not whether it was a good idea that equal relative widths were, in fact, not equal.
That is, I don't care how it was changed, all I knew is that the current behaviour ran contrary to the principle of least surprise. All that happened is that the people with the opinion and the pwoer decided it was not a bug, when it was not clear at all that this was the case.
I don't really care whether it is a "bug" or not (though I do consider it one). My objection is that there was obviously an issue with how Moz rendered widths which is not addressed in any meaningful way, standard or not.
Compare with the decision to reimplement <MARQUEE>; seems rather arbitrary.
Thanks. Ook!
Another is seeing all those pr0n sites in your cookie block list.
How my favourite bug was turned into a feature is the best example I have of how easy it is to get off the track with big projects like this.
The bug got lost in several threads, flames and arguments about what IE does or does not do, until it was finally marked WONTFIX by a Mozilla demi-god. IMHO, they missed the point. There is a constant refrain in Bugzilla about whether something is "standard" or not.
From my experience, the argument about web standards is used to either fix or not fix something, depending on how someone feels about a problem.
Don't think it's a problem? don't fix it and say "it's not standard, so we won;t" or "it's not standard, but we break the standard everywhere where it makes sense". Some behaviour need changing? The same arguments apply.
I may be just whining here, but sometime I think the fact that Mozilla is a web browser is lost in the arguments. I still love Moz, but the fact that the right-margin jumps around on my otherwise fine HTML 4.x and CSS pages will always bother me.
What burns my britches is that this decision is in direct contradiction with well-established consumer rights in some countries.
For instance, in Cananda, I have the right to make verbatim copies of any media I want, as long as I am the owner of the original and do not allow more than one copy to be used at the same time. I'm pretty sure that I could legally burn 10,000 copies of any BMG title and use them to shingle my roof if I so desired (I wouldn't, but I could).
I'm also pretty sure that BMG is not allowed to restrict these rights.
The problem is that even though we have these pretty strong consumer rights in Canada, interest in protecting these rights by the government has eroded to the point where it is just a funny funny joke.
Another problem I have is that I do not buy CDs at the "big" stores. I purchase from a local music dealer who I have a good relationship with. If it was HMV I'd just return the CD and say "it don't work". I don't give a shit if BMG isn't going to reimburse HMV, because I'll stand there and power pout until I get my fscking way. I won't feel so good about doing that to a smaller retailer.
This actually happened recently when I picked up the latest "Queens of the Stone Age" and the CD wouldn't mount in my iBook. I wasn't even ripping or burning it. I was fscking trying to listen to the CD at the coffee shop. No, we can't have that, so it locks up the iBook CDRom player so hard I have to reboot to read any CD. I want to return it, but I'd feel bad going back to this great music store I found.
If I was feeling paranoid, I'd suggest that this tactic also has the effect of hurting smaller retailers more, leaving BMG, HMV &etc. with an even bigger share of the CD retailer market.
Reading this article has reminded me how much people suck. Grumble. Bitch. Complain.
What interests me is that the Foo Fighters are pretty blase about the whole "stealing music" thing. Grohl has said more than once that he could care less.
Actually, it was more like a tongue-in-cheek "We're a punk band. Oh, don't copy our music. We wouldn't want that."
Music careers are built on getting music into the hands (ears?) of listeners. It's been said before, but this whole copy-protection thing is simply to protect the "rights" of the music companies to earn further profit. I guess someone has to pay for all that payola to radio stations.
Oh, wait. There is only one radio station now. "C-c-c-clone Radio. All the same, all the time!"
No, man. It was Floyd who were on the dark side of the moon.
Whoa. I gotta go site down. I'm starting to peak.
I knew a guy who was involved in some of the initial meetings, but really don't know much beyond that. Basically, it means getting a wireless access point and letting people use your network (or a segment, anyway). Or something. I'm short on the details.
Try this for more info: planning@waterloowireless.org
I know this has been mentioned in another post, but apropros of this article, the Waterloo Wireless group is (or was, I haven't heard from them in some time) trying for complete world domination at 11Mbit/sec.
I personally think that Tim Horton's (for those of you who need a reference, Timmies is like Krispy Kreme without all the ambience) should go all Starbuck's on us and implement wireless access points in their coffee shops. Well, at least around the University of Waterloo, anyway.
Seriously, much too hard. I know a couple (he is Canadian, she is Swedish) who married and wanted to have her come over and become a citizen. The hoops they had to jump through were ridiculous.
I suppose it makes sense to someone, but it seemed pretty arbitrary. She was gainfully employed, spoke several languages, university educated, and they still gave her a hard time. They asked a lot of very personal questions, and ones they _can't_ ask once you are a citizen. They made him sign some crazy paper about how he was legally bound to support her, and could go to jail if she broke the law. I suppose this only proves that Immigration Canada is being fair, as she wasn't a member of any visible minority.
Canada is built on immigration from other countries. Both the US and Canada would have negative population rates unless we accepted people from elsewhere.
That being said, all my American friends who moved here to become Canadians did so with a concious choice to no longer live in the US (all for various reasons). This is not a dig, but a personal observation.
Everyone thinks their country/city/club is the best. Canada is great! Don't believe all you hear on Southpark ;)
Come on up!
Um, no. I personally own everything I've ripped, and in Canada it is a consumer right to make as many damn personal copies for whatever reason I want. As long as I keep the original and all copies (or destroy all copies), and do not allow more then one copy to be used at the same time, I am breaking no law.
As for quality? Well, there are good rips and bad rips and some formats seem to be better at some bitrates than others, depending on the source. The real fact is that every single one of the lossy compression formats throw away data to get the total sampled size down.
The main application for these lossy digital audio formats are convenience and media flexibility. With any of these formats data fidelity is, by definition, of lesser importance.
You better believe it. The development work to make yet another port is pretty easy (except for the OS/390 -- that was especially fun) but the QA is crazy.
Well, we do have a chunk of native code that the Java hangs off of, but that is very POSIX, so we usually don't run into problems there.
I hate it when I get all testy. I get modded down.
Amen to that. Between that and choosing postfix instead of sendmail, my new mantra is "simplifiy, simplify, simplify".
In my experience, if you provide an ISO, nobody buys a CD, and they just burn the ISO. With OBSD, at least one person buys a CD, and all his/her friends copy that.
This helps OBSD make exactly one sale, instead of none.
Seriously, I don't know. There isn't much incentive to buy OpenBSD CD sets (or any free OS, for that matter) in the first place. Giving the CDs away is just not going to help that, if you ask me.
Then again, I've bought few CD sets myself; I usually just get a few t-shirts and install via FTP and/or create my own ISO.
It was an attempt at humour. I've read the FAQ on this.
Well, this is a hardship only because you want to dual-boot, I'm guessing. Otherwise, you just partition and mount so that / is on the first 8Gb slice.
There are third-party boot managers that do magic to allow booting to happen from almost anywhere, for almost any OS. I don't know if it works with OBSD or not.
I've only run OBSD stand-alone on headless edge boxes, so I've never worried my pretty little head about the 8Gb limit. I'm assuming most folks who pay for the CDs every 6 months or so feel the same way. Well, that and the stickers. The stickers rule.
I thought "security by obscurity" didn't count ;)
It's pretty common to run a few releases back on important and complex daemons like BIND, or Sendmail.
There is little value in going to BIND 8 or 9 if it has not been audited by the OBSD team first. BIND 4 is well understood and the faults, warts and bugs are well-known. BIND 8 is still new enough that it is considered an unknown.
This is one of the downsides (if you consider it a downsid) of trying to be "secure by design".
Of course, OBSD is free, as in beer and as in speech. This means you can run a parallel box with BIND 8 or 9 (or whatever) yourelf until you deem it safe. The responsibility is now yours to maintain security on that chunk of the OS, but everything is a trade-off, especially in host security.
BIND 8/9 will eventually make it into a future release. 99% of us do not need it, however, and so having a well-known and secure BIND 4 implementation has more value for the rest of us.
This puzzled me. I've been running an OBSD router since 2.6 (and we've been running it at work since 2.8). The releases have been coming out pretty much every 6 months, haven't they?
I upgrade about once a year, so I often skip releases, but I think they've only missed the release dates a few times, and only by a week or so.
Bugs will be found, which (of course) is the point of the OBSD project. I just don't see any shame in that. Lot's of organizations get compromised. The real test is how the organization reacts and recovers.
*shrug* From my POV, the releases have been getting better and better. I can't imagine running anything else as an edge box.
Of course, I may be wrong. Even openbsd.org runs Solaris!
Actually, chunks of OpenBSD have made it into embedded security devices. I don't have the link handy, but the details are on OpenBSD.org.
Java 1.3 is not "production" ready on any BSD, AFAIK. I've looked into this quite a bit, and even ported an app to FreeBSD.
They have recently been blessed by Sun to provide a native version of the JDK (the previous versions ran in linux_compat mode), but it is not considered production-ready by the developers.
Our customer threw caution to the wind, and has been running our app for a year or so now on FreeBSD. So far, so good. We _did_ QA it. Sheesh.
OpenBSD Java support is still (again, AFAIK)) a tweakers domain. If you need official J2EE, go with Linux (or one of those "others").
Depends who you talk to ;)
A good place to start is here, to find out what the intentions of the OBSD project are. Then check out the OpenBSD Journal to see what people do with it.
My two cents: OBSD really shines as a secure inet server. Things like httpd, sshd, firewalling, bridging, routing. People do use it as a desktop, but IMHO it is not as desktop-friendly as FreeBSD. *shrug* I run it basically headless, as does everyone I know.
Then again, a cutting-edge desktop system is not a primary concern of the OBSD project.
Someone did :)