Making your page look good on every browser and platform is impossible. It will take too much work and you probably don't have all the systems
Bullshit!
Making a page that looks good on every browser is as simple as using standard W3C approved HTML. Once you start using advanced CSS you'll run into a few problems, but they're managable. But once you start using scripts, animations, frames and proprietary plugins, you'll never get it to look decent on any browser but they one you're coding for.
We've got a new guy at work who used to be a web developer. I had a long discussion with him about why websites were designed for specific browsers. Why use all these proprietary plugins and scripts redirecting browsers to appropriate versions, instead of just using the standards that are out there. The answer was surprising to me. "The requirement and specifications that come from marketing demand that the website look *identical* to every viewer."
He was serious. His former company was paying testers to measure stuff on the screen, to verify that a box in NS wasn't two pixels taller than it was under IE. They even had some pages on the site that were 100% Flash. If more browsers could handle embedded PDF, they'd use that instead. Ridiculous.
Use FRAMES and Images maps if you need it.
Good idea. Especially since you NEVER need to use frames, and should ALWAYS accompany image maps with standard text navigation.
Sheesh, I bet you're one of these guys that doesn't even use alt tags.
Flash and Shockwave when necessary
And just when are Flash and Shockwave ever necessary?
I'm thinking of the apps I deal with on a daily basis... and the number of languages is tremendous!
No kidding. Although most of my software is written in C and C++, a significant portion is not. Most of the control and infrastructure layer for my OS is written in bourne shell and Perl. I update my system using software written in Modula 3 and Ruby. My text editor uses Lisp. Python abounds. I have software written in Objective C, Pascal and even assembler. Components of some software use Scheme.
On the other hand, NOTHING in my system is written in C#, VB.Net or even Java.
Since their contract does not give me anything I don't already have, it is unenforcable because there is no "consideration".
Bravo! Your payment for the software doesn't count as consideration, because you paid for it *before* you clicked the button, and you paid that fee to someone *other* than Microsoft (like to the clerk at CompUSA). The MS EULA is not a legally binding contract.
Trying to unilaterally impose a contract after the fact is ludicrous.
Basically, since the GPL is the only document granting you permission to use the software
Wrong. The *law* gives you the right to use any software you have legally obtained. Period. You won't have the right to create derivative works, or to redistribute it, but you do have the right to USE it.
No code belonging to the FSF or RMS was in KDE. And they knew it. If RMS was right about KDE needing forgiveness, then the forgiveness should have come from only two parties: Linus Torvalds (for kfloppy) and Aladdin (for kghostscript). No other KDE code was a derivative work of any prior GPL code.
To date, neither Mr. Torvalds nor Aladdin have forgiven KDE. I can only assume then KDE is still illegal and I am still a criminal for distributing it. Come arrest me.
I think you've missed my whole point. The whole internet is unbalanced from top to bottom. You can't fix one part of it without affecting all of it. This will cause changes to occur. Some will be good and others will be bad. What will NEVER happen, however, is a fix to spam that does not affect everything else in the mix.
Spam is like a disease. You have three basic choices:
1) Status quo. Ignore the disease and do nothing.
2) Treat the symptoms. Pass a law and put a bandaid on the wound.
3) Treat the underlying disease. As with all diseases, the cure will have side effects.
My proposed cure, since no one yet has proposed anything other than a legal bandaid, is to charge for bandwidth. This is sensible economically, since bandwidth is a scarce resource and has real costs. The current method of charging everyone a flat fee for internet access is not working. The technical details will need to be worked out, but the basic idea is sound. I fully expect it to happen with or without my input. The market forces demand it. No matter how much you disagree with market forces, they are a reality that won't go away just because you manage to get a law passed. Market forces are causing spam, and they can be used to reduce spam.
There are, of course, side effects to this cure. I am not denying them. Our memberships in mailing lists might have to be paid for. I'm willing to do this. Are you?
How do you know 2.2 series wasn't plagued by crap like this before.
Because I've been using Linux since the 2.0 days. Remember, not everyone in Slashdot is still in kindergarten. Some of us actually have histories longer than six weeks.
I'm not blaming any individuals for the mess of 2.4. From my perspective, Linux has outgrown its development structure and is in desperate need of a new one.
Ok so yeah, the kernel roll out for the 2.4 series hasn't been as smooth as we all would like it to be, but does that really matter?
It matters because the Linux reputation is at stake, During 2.0 and 2.2, Linux had a reputation for utmost reliability and stability. That reputation is now eroding. People looking in at the Linux world see "whoops" releases. That's not good.
Yes we like things to be professional, but professionallism is for companies.
That's the whole problem now, isn't it? You all have this alien notion that professionalism is bad. People look at Linux and they see a bunch of developers PROUD that they don't do professional quality work. They see people proud that there is no design. Proud that there aren't any specs. Proud that there isn't any formal testing.
If that's the way you want Linux to be, then fine. But don't expect Linux to have any solid reputation outside of your own little clique.
It doesn't matter about my mailbox at all. It's publicly available for people to stuff messages into. But my ISP is a different matter. So are all those servers out there the spammers use. My ISP's mailer server is for the use of the ISP and ISP's clients. A spammer that uses it to bounce messages around and stuff is breaking the law.
One million emails at one cent each costs $10,000. For you and I, with our puny few hundred emails a month (at most), pay a couple of bucks. That 10K though is a huge margin.
Market forces DO work. That's the whole reason we have spam in the first place. The cost of sending spam is zero! You can't get a bigger market incentive than that! In the meantime, we pay exactly the same fees that the spammers do for using a fraction of the bandwidth they do.
That's not professionalism, it's a complete lack of any plan. Sometimes I suspect Linux doesn't even have a release manager. What? They don't? I knew it!
Open Source means that such bonehead blunders get fixed quickly and efficiently. In the meantime, this is the stable branch of the poster boy for Open Source. This raw egg everywhere certainly demonstrates the openness, but it doesn't do jack to demonstrate any professionalism.
Of course, nothing in life is perfect. But the whole 2.4 branch has been plagued by crap like this from day one. Frankly, Linux is starting to get a reputation, and it's not a pretty one.
If Windows users won't try Linux/BSD/Unix merely because there's not some hegemon forcing a single desktop on them, then they can keep Windows for all I care.
And if they're complaining that not every application has the same theme, they've obviously not used Windows much. Think Quicktime and WinAmp which cannot have the Windows "theme", and Media Player and Netscape, which allow themes not available for other applications. Until Windows users start complaining to Apple for the inconsistant theme of Quicktime, I'll ignore their spurious complaints.
And talk about shallow! Not even the Sahara Ocean is that shallow!
It costs a spammer zero dollars and zero cents to send out an email to one million people. If only.001% of the recipients reply and buy that's 1000 new customers. That's damn effective.
Anything that will raise the cost of sending spam will reduce it. Legislation is one way, but it is not the only way. Right now sending spam to one million people costs just as much as sending a single email to your grandmother. Bandwidth needs to become a commodity bought and sold in a market environment. The silly notion of unlimited bandwidth for $xx a month has to stop. The charges would be small enough that it wouldn't affect you or I, but it would cause the spammers to start trimming their lists and properly targeting their recipients.
Well, when Earthlink started spamming me (not some user of Earthlink, but the company itself), I reported them in the approved manner to abuse@earthlink.net. A day later I got an apology and said they would stop. A day after that I got another one, so I wrote to abuse@earthlink.net and threatened to sue. All spam from Earthlink, Inc. has now stopped.
Did you read the same article I did? It sounds to me that ICANN is going to handed over to governments, not corporations. Before you protest that there is no difference, let me remind you that you are not forced to do business with a corporation, but are forced to follow government rules, regulations and laws. Choose not to obey the wishes of Verisign, AOL or Cisco by not buying their products and nothing happens. Choose not to obey the government by not paying taxes and you go to jail.
I'm all in favor of toll roads. But private market driven toll roads not government owned and congress/parliament operated toll roads.
Without the market forces, the only purpose of government owned toll roads is to raise revenues, and there's much more efficient means of doing that (thugs with badges).
With market forces the price for driving on congested roads rises, thus alleviating the congestion; the demand for mass traffic rises and the price lowers; tolls target the roads used so that the roads most used which need the most mainenance get the most money; etc.
I love the duplication of effort. Don't ever stop it. Why? Simple. Because the desktop I want to use might not be the system you want to use. I'm serious. We just might disagree on whether the enforced and mandatory destkop should be Gnome or KDE.
I've only had NFS on my FreeBSD box at work for a short while. But I've had it on my Solaris box for three years now. For a while last year the server would crash and burn every hour or two. A very horrible situation that only got resolved when we threatened to send to the servers back to Sun via patriot missile. This went on for a week. Not once did it cause any of the Solaris clients to buckle or fold.
p.s. I suspect that a certain Sun rep deliberately sabotaged our servers in order to generate support calls. Obviously he is no longer a Sun rep.
A spammer could send millions of spams for only a few megabytes of traffic.
Eventually those millions of spams translate into millions of individual emails, all clogging up the works. Those few megabtytes eventually become several gigabytes. Those gigabytes use limited resources. By charging for those resources, the fees eventually filter there way back to the spammer.
Like I said before, I'm not a networking expert, but here is a possible scenario. Spammer sends out an individual email addressed to one thousand recipient. The spammer's ISP sees 1K of bandwidth. So far the charges to the spammer is one one cent. But suddenly the message hits a node that routes that single message off in ten different directions. The ISP gets charged ten cents, which he passes on to the spammer. And those ten split them off again ten different ways. And once more. Those charges filter back to the spammer for ten dollars.
When does Linux become the standard as opposed to Posix?
There are two kinds of standards: informal de facto standards and formalized official standards.
Linux certainly is not the formal official standard for anything, not even for itself, since you are not allowed to define a thing in terms of itself. POSIX is the formal standard because it went through a formal standardization process. There's an actual document reviewed and approved by experts after much discussion that says what POSIX is.
Is Linux an informal de facto standard? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what your definition is. It may be a standard for a kernel, but your system is much more than a kernel, it's an amalgamation of software from several different projects. So you end up with software that says it needs this version of a kernel and that version of a libc and you're still not sure you won't have to crowbar it into place unless you're running the exact same distro version that the packager used.
The aim of POSIX is to get beyond all of this. If you have a POSIX compliant system, and the software claims POSIX compliance as well, you are virtually guaranteed that the software will work. That's great! (POSIX is actually a set of standards, so my referal to it as a single standard is merely semantic shorthand)
But I want to respond to your unwritten question. If my powers of telepathy still operate sufficiently, I can tell that your real question is "when will Linux finally become a standard?" Okay, may telepathy is a bit rusty, it might not be you thinking this, but I'm definitely picking it up from someone. The answer is, "Linux should never become a standard." The reason is simple: standards and implementations of the standards are two very different things. Eventually Linux may implement POSIX so well that it becomes a "reference" implementation, but it will never be the standard itself.
Think about the web for a bit, and you'll understand. Because of a variety of bizarre circumstances, including certain recessive genes in most web developers, implementations have gained the status of standards. And the result is chaos. Web sites aren't written to standards, they're written to specific implementations of the standards. Unless you're using one particular browser released by a company in Washington, you will *never* be able to access every web site claiming standards conformance. The situation is even worse in word processing land where MSWord is the standard.
I don't want to see those situations occur in Unix. So please write your software to the POSIX standards instead of to the Linux implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
Making your page look good on every browser and platform is impossible. It will take too much work and you probably don't have all the systems
Bullshit!
Making a page that looks good on every browser is as simple as using standard W3C approved HTML. Once you start using advanced CSS you'll run into a few problems, but they're managable. But once you start using scripts, animations, frames and proprietary plugins, you'll never get it to look decent on any browser but they one you're coding for.
We've got a new guy at work who used to be a web developer. I had a long discussion with him about why websites were designed for specific browsers. Why use all these proprietary plugins and scripts redirecting browsers to appropriate versions, instead of just using the standards that are out there. The answer was surprising to me. "The requirement and specifications that come from marketing demand that the website look *identical* to every viewer."
He was serious. His former company was paying testers to measure stuff on the screen, to verify that a box in NS wasn't two pixels taller than it was under IE. They even had some pages on the site that were 100% Flash. If more browsers could handle embedded PDF, they'd use that instead. Ridiculous.
Use FRAMES and Images maps if you need it.
Good idea. Especially since you NEVER need to use frames, and should ALWAYS accompany image maps with standard text navigation.
Sheesh, I bet you're one of these guys that doesn't even use alt tags.
Flash and Shockwave when necessary
And just when are Flash and Shockwave ever necessary?
I learned Pascal and Fortran my first year in college. Funny, I've never once used those languages on the job.
Java is chosen as a teaching language because it is well suited for a teaching language. Period.
I'm thinking of the apps I deal with on a daily basis... and the number of languages is tremendous!
No kidding. Although most of my software is written in C and C++, a significant portion is not. Most of the control and infrastructure layer for my OS is written in bourne shell and Perl. I update my system using software written in Modula 3 and Ruby. My text editor uses Lisp. Python abounds. I have software written in Objective C, Pascal and even assembler. Components of some software use Scheme.
On the other hand, NOTHING in my system is written in C#, VB.Net or even Java.
Since their contract does not give me anything I don't already have, it is unenforcable because there is no "consideration".
Bravo! Your payment for the software doesn't count as consideration, because you paid for it *before* you clicked the button, and you paid that fee to someone *other* than Microsoft (like to the clerk at CompUSA). The MS EULA is not a legally binding contract.
Trying to unilaterally impose a contract after the fact is ludicrous.
Basically, since the GPL is the only document granting you permission to use the software
Wrong. The *law* gives you the right to use any software you have legally obtained. Period. You won't have the right to create derivative works, or to redistribute it, but you do have the right to USE it.
No code belonging to the FSF or RMS was in KDE. And they knew it. If RMS was right about KDE needing forgiveness, then the forgiveness should have come from only two parties: Linus Torvalds (for kfloppy) and Aladdin (for kghostscript). No other KDE code was a derivative work of any prior GPL code.
To date, neither Mr. Torvalds nor Aladdin have forgiven KDE. I can only assume then KDE is still illegal and I am still a criminal for distributing it. Come arrest me.
I think you've missed my whole point. The whole internet is unbalanced from top to bottom. You can't fix one part of it without affecting all of it. This will cause changes to occur. Some will be good and others will be bad. What will NEVER happen, however, is a fix to spam that does not affect everything else in the mix.
Spam is like a disease. You have three basic choices:
1) Status quo. Ignore the disease and do nothing.
2) Treat the symptoms. Pass a law and put a bandaid on the wound.
3) Treat the underlying disease. As with all diseases, the cure will have side effects.
My proposed cure, since no one yet has proposed anything other than a legal bandaid, is to charge for bandwidth. This is sensible economically, since bandwidth is a scarce resource and has real costs. The current method of charging everyone a flat fee for internet access is not working. The technical details will need to be worked out, but the basic idea is sound. I fully expect it to happen with or without my input. The market forces demand it. No matter how much you disagree with market forces, they are a reality that won't go away just because you manage to get a law passed. Market forces are causing spam, and they can be used to reduce spam.
There are, of course, side effects to this cure. I am not denying them. Our memberships in mailing lists might have to be paid for. I'm willing to do this. Are you?
How do you know 2.2 series wasn't plagued by crap like this before.
Because I've been using Linux since the 2.0 days. Remember, not everyone in Slashdot is still in kindergarten. Some of us actually have histories longer than six weeks.
I'm not blaming any individuals for the mess of 2.4. From my perspective, Linux has outgrown its development structure and is in desperate need of a new one.
Ok so yeah, the kernel roll out for the 2.4 series hasn't been as smooth as we all would like it to be, but does that really matter?
It matters because the Linux reputation is at stake, During 2.0 and 2.2, Linux had a reputation for utmost reliability and stability. That reputation is now eroding. People looking in at the Linux world see "whoops" releases. That's not good.
Yes we like things to be professional, but professionallism is for companies.
That's the whole problem now, isn't it? You all have this alien notion that professionalism is bad. People look at Linux and they see a bunch of developers PROUD that they don't do professional quality work. They see people proud that there is no design. Proud that there aren't any specs. Proud that there isn't any formal testing.
If that's the way you want Linux to be, then fine. But don't expect Linux to have any solid reputation outside of your own little clique.
If it costs zero dollars and zero cents to send out a mass mailing, any percentage is damn effective.
It doesn't matter about my mailbox at all. It's publicly available for people to stuff messages into. But my ISP is a different matter. So are all those servers out there the spammers use. My ISP's mailer server is for the use of the ISP and ISP's clients. A spammer that uses it to bounce messages around and stuff is breaking the law.
One million emails at one cent each costs $10,000. For you and I, with our puny few hundred emails a month (at most), pay a couple of bucks. That 10K though is a huge margin.
Market forces DO work. That's the whole reason we have spam in the first place. The cost of sending spam is zero! You can't get a bigger market incentive than that! In the meantime, we pay exactly the same fees that the spammers do for using a fraction of the bandwidth they do.
That's not professionalism, it's a complete lack of any plan. Sometimes I suspect Linux doesn't even have a release manager. What? They don't? I knew it!
Open Source means that such bonehead blunders get fixed quickly and efficiently. In the meantime, this is the stable branch of the poster boy for Open Source. This raw egg everywhere certainly demonstrates the openness, but it doesn't do jack to demonstrate any professionalism.
Of course, nothing in life is perfect. But the whole 2.4 branch has been plagued by crap like this from day one. Frankly, Linux is starting to get a reputation, and it's not a pretty one.
What users REALLY want is translucent window backgrounds
They already have it. You're screen shot shows a transparent konsole. That's been around since 2.0.
If Windows users won't try Linux/BSD/Unix merely because there's not some hegemon forcing a single desktop on them, then they can keep Windows for all I care.
And if they're complaining that not every application has the same theme, they've obviously not used Windows much. Think Quicktime and WinAmp which cannot have the Windows "theme", and Media Player and Netscape, which allow themes not available for other applications. Until Windows users start complaining to Apple for the inconsistant theme of Quicktime, I'll ignore their spurious complaints.
And talk about shallow! Not even the Sahara Ocean is that shallow!
It costs a spammer zero dollars and zero cents to send out an email to one million people. If only .001% of the recipients reply and buy that's 1000 new customers. That's damn effective.
So, my advice would be never to invoke a law that not only has never widely been followed but also is totally dumb
It's not a totally dumb law, but quite sensible. Translated into modern English, it says "don't mess with my stuff without asking first".
Thus, legislation is the ONLY way to combat it.
Anything that will raise the cost of sending spam will reduce it. Legislation is one way, but it is not the only way. Right now sending spam to one million people costs just as much as sending a single email to your grandmother. Bandwidth needs to become a commodity bought and sold in a market environment. The silly notion of unlimited bandwidth for $xx a month has to stop. The charges would be small enough that it wouldn't affect you or I, but it would cause the spammers to start trimming their lists and properly targeting their recipients.
Well, when Earthlink started spamming me (not some user of Earthlink, but the company itself), I reported them in the approved manner to abuse@earthlink.net. A day later I got an apology and said they would stop. A day after that I got another one, so I wrote to abuse@earthlink.net and threatened to sue. All spam from Earthlink, Inc. has now stopped.
Did you read the same article I did? It sounds to me that ICANN is going to handed over to governments, not corporations. Before you protest that there is no difference, let me remind you that you are not forced to do business with a corporation, but are forced to follow government rules, regulations and laws. Choose not to obey the wishes of Verisign, AOL or Cisco by not buying their products and nothing happens. Choose not to obey the government by not paying taxes and you go to jail.
ask yourself why strlcpy() still isn't part of glibc
Because if it isn't invented at GNU they won't use it?
I'm all in favor of toll roads. But private market driven toll roads not government owned and congress/parliament operated toll roads.
Without the market forces, the only purpose of government owned toll roads is to raise revenues, and there's much more efficient means of doing that (thugs with badges).
With market forces the price for driving on congested roads rises, thus alleviating the congestion; the demand for mass traffic rises and the price lowers; tolls target the roads used so that the roads most used which need the most mainenance get the most money; etc.
I love the duplication of effort. Don't ever stop it. Why? Simple. Because the desktop I want to use might not be the system you want to use. I'm serious. We just might disagree on whether the enforced and mandatory destkop should be Gnome or KDE.
I've only had NFS on my FreeBSD box at work for a short while. But I've had it on my Solaris box for three years now. For a while last year the server would crash and burn every hour or two. A very horrible situation that only got resolved when we threatened to send to the servers back to Sun via patriot missile. This went on for a week. Not once did it cause any of the Solaris clients to buckle or fold.
p.s. I suspect that a certain Sun rep deliberately sabotaged our servers in order to generate support calls. Obviously he is no longer a Sun rep.
A spammer could send millions of spams for only a few megabytes of traffic.
Eventually those millions of spams translate into millions of individual emails, all clogging up the works. Those few megabtytes eventually become several gigabytes. Those gigabytes use limited resources. By charging for those resources, the fees eventually filter there way back to the spammer.
Like I said before, I'm not a networking expert, but here is a possible scenario. Spammer sends out an individual email addressed to one thousand recipient. The spammer's ISP sees 1K of bandwidth. So far the charges to the spammer is one one cent. But suddenly the message hits a node that routes that single message off in ten different directions. The ISP gets charged ten cents, which he passes on to the spammer. And those ten split them off again ten different ways. And once more. Those charges filter back to the spammer for ten dollars.
When does Linux become the standard as opposed to Posix?
There are two kinds of standards: informal de facto standards and formalized official standards.
Linux certainly is not the formal official standard for anything, not even for itself, since you are not allowed to define a thing in terms of itself. POSIX is the formal standard because it went through a formal standardization process. There's an actual document reviewed and approved by experts after much discussion that says what POSIX is.
Is Linux an informal de facto standard? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what your definition is. It may be a standard for a kernel, but your system is much more than a kernel, it's an amalgamation of software from several different projects. So you end up with software that says it needs this version of a kernel and that version of a libc and you're still not sure you won't have to crowbar it into place unless you're running the exact same distro version that the packager used.
The aim of POSIX is to get beyond all of this. If you have a POSIX compliant system, and the software claims POSIX compliance as well, you are virtually guaranteed that the software will work. That's great! (POSIX is actually a set of standards, so my referal to it as a single standard is merely semantic shorthand)
But I want to respond to your unwritten question. If my powers of telepathy still operate sufficiently, I can tell that your real question is "when will Linux finally become a standard?" Okay, may telepathy is a bit rusty, it might not be you thinking this, but I'm definitely picking it up from someone. The answer is, "Linux should never become a standard." The reason is simple: standards and implementations of the standards are two very different things. Eventually Linux may implement POSIX so well that it becomes a "reference" implementation, but it will never be the standard itself.
Think about the web for a bit, and you'll understand. Because of a variety of bizarre circumstances, including certain recessive genes in most web developers, implementations have gained the status of standards. And the result is chaos. Web sites aren't written to standards, they're written to specific implementations of the standards. Unless you're using one particular browser released by a company in Washington, you will *never* be able to access every web site claiming standards conformance. The situation is even worse in word processing land where MSWord is the standard.
I don't want to see those situations occur in Unix. So please write your software to the POSIX standards instead of to the Linux implementation.