I use Opera as my primary browser, and have Netscape 7, Phoenix, Mozilla and IE on my system. I resort to NS7 if something is inoperative in Opera (when I was using O6). Hopefully, I won't have to do that with O7, but we'll see.
I use IE to check if a page I've written looks good or not. Meanwhile, my web stats say that Opera has about 1% of the market, NS/Moz about 2%, and the rest is IE. Gotta love competition.
Wonder why MS is only trying to break Opera and not NS/Mozilla.
I love the bald-faced lying that MS pulls out for this behavior. "We're heavily invested in following standards." or "We're trying to produce the best site for all viewers." Yeah, right. Explain why there would be any reason at all to force every child entity 30 pixels to the left of its parent. For that matter, why does MSN still use the tired old hack of sending different pages to each browser? I don't need 4 versions of my site to handle every viewer. Amazing.
Not to mention that bookstores seem to think that all SF readers want to see 800 different Star XXXX books, most completely indistinguishible from each other. Maybe they should have a Sci-Fi section next to the Science Fiction section. Those of us that know better would steer well clear of that sci-fi crap, letting the Lucas and Spielberg-raised Sci-Fi "fans" get their fill of that dreck.:-)
If you're using "SF" to refer to Science Fiction, which is the most common breakout, rather than Speculative Fiction, you're missing the boat entirely with the books you have mentioned. Sounds like you want FANTASY books.
If you are looking for unusual well-written fantasy, check out Storm Constantine. The Wraethu omnibus edition is usually available, and it's a stunning piece of gothic fantasy alternate-reality post-apocalyptic gender-bending writing. Can't get enough hyphens.
For science fiction work, of course there's Neal Stephenson, and the recently feted Cory Doctorow. You can't go wrong with the classics of Heinlein and Asimov, of course.
Beyond that, as others have said, try something outside the F&SF realm. Or, if you can't bring yourself to do that, subscribe to Analog, Asimov's or F&SF to get a taste of new authors. Short fiction is like the snack before you dig into a big meaty novel.
Fireworks is, by far, the predominant web-designer tool for making small cross-platform compatible animations (rollovers, animated GIFs, etc).
Dreamweaver is preferred by all but the most masochistic of web-designers for making clean HTML-compatible code and for linking to a variety of database back-ends or scripting languages (support for PHP, CFM, etc).
Picture, if you will, the usual MS code-bloat and flash-over-usability on those programs. Gone will be the simple blank-page on startup, replaced with an annoying Wizard you can't get rid of for love or money. Gone will be cross-platform compatibility, in favor of Windows-only nonsense. And, the help agents! I don't think I could stand Dreamweaver MX-XP 2004 with some dumb paperclip or puppy telling me how to code an SQL connection.
Interesting that web designers that get paid to produce large numbers of clean, cross-platform, HTML-standard pages use Dreamweaver then. How interesting indeed, if Dreamweaver produces "crap html code" that the normal output of a Dreamweaver MX coding session can pass the HTML 4.01 strict tests with nary a blink.
Perhaps you just enjoy the masochism inherent in hand-coding.
The differing philosophies of police and military come into play when the government decides that the Army should assist a local police force. The Police are trained to use minimum force to attain pacification and control. The military is trained to use overwhelming force to gain control in the minimum time possible. Also, the military is taught to minimize collateral damage, while the police are taught that collateral damage is unacceptable.
So, imagine the difference in how those two groups would handle, for example, a hostage situation.
Your information is slightly inaccurate. The Director of NSA has never ignored the Congressional Intelligence Oversight committee. He has, however, ignored on occasion a summons to testify in open session about things which are classified.
DIRNSA (at least the current Director) has been very cooperative with the Congress, as they do control his budget. He makes regular reports to the Security Council, as well as sporadic testimony to closed sessions and the very rare open session.
The oversight machinery in place to monitor DCI and DIRNSA is quite formidable, but it is, by its very nature, mostly invisible to the normal citizenry. It is a sad fact that countries do not have friends, only interests. Because of that, anything that a sufficiently large group knows (i.e., the US populace), so would people that you'd rather not know.
Of course the citizens don't know what the NSA is up to. If we knew, so would Bin Laden, Hussein, Prince Saud, and anyone else who is interested in thwarting those efforts.
The hardest part for most people to understand about intelligence is how fragile it is. SIGINT can provide amazingly detailed information about our adversaries, but it can be denied so much more easily and cheaply than it can be gained.
Of course the NSA is secretive. It's all about protecting the source. If the public knew exactly what the NSA's capabilities were, so would the enemies of the USA (and don't kid yourself that we have no enemies). It is infinitely easier to lose a source than to exploit one.
Here's an example I used in my basic intelligence class, for new recruits: KAL 007. For those out of high school, you should remember Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983. The USSR shot the passenger plane down for straying into Soviet airspace. The NSA had recordings of exactly what the pilots of those MIGs were saying, proving that they knew the plane was a passenger jet and not a spy plane. The recordings also proved that the commander of that unit ordered the shootdown, and it was not a rogue pilot acting without orders. This is pretty damaging material, right? But, as soon as it became public, the Soviets would change their radio security systems, probably blocking any intercept of their TacAir for months or years to come. The President makes those decisions, nobody lower. President Reagan, with advice from his security council (including big daddy DIRNSA), decided that embarrassing the Soviets and proving their official culpability in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians was worth the loss of Soviet tacair intercepts.
I worked with SIGINT for 12 years, and there is no doubt in my mind that DIRNSA is working in the best interests of the American people as a whole. Was this particular speech scripted? Of course, but then so is everything else in public sessions when dealing with intelligence. About 80% of what the NSA does is classified at levels that very few people even know exist, much less have access to. For good reason, too.
With all that said, I believe a healthy skepticism of our federal government is a good thing, an essential thing. A democracy cannot remain clean if the citizenry become sheep. Power corrupts, and there are few able to contain their greed for more power, if not for the watchful oversight of concerned citizens.
Part of the Coastal Conservation Act, from 1974 I believe. Basically states that the coast from Santa Barbara to San Francisco shall not be developed beyond certain very minimal allowable actions.
Makes the coast between SB and SF not look like the port of San Pedro, which is a Good Thing.
Sorry for not replying sooner, but Anonymous Cowards don't generate message notifications.
In defense of Livejournal
on
Blogger Hacked
·
· Score: 1
First, I have to agree that most weblogs and almost all Livejournals are complete and utter shit.
However, the Livejournal community is similar to the BBS communities many of us old farts remember. The ability to search for someone in a centralized database of interests and geography is a way to find others of similar mindset, or an interesting mindset anyway.
Coincidentally, I just wrote a short essay about how Livejournal differs from other "blogs" (I hate that word).
A lot of LJ users know each other, or they set up meetings, much like our old BBS meetings. So, they're not writing for the general public, they're writing for their friends. If someone else finds them interesting enough to watch, good; if not, oh well.
The demographics on LJ, though, are scary. The majority of the users are 15-year-old girls. That's a good indication of the writing to expect on any random journal.:-)
I only see a small piece of the Navy's IT structure, primarily the systems that deal with intelligence collection and dissemination. The current development system runs on Solaris 2.8, and they allow clients running Windows to connect, but the developers don't like it. Current military developers (I work with Joint, Navy and AF) seem to have a great love of using Java for the interface controls. This allows any properly-configured client on a network to access the server, and then the geeks can keep their servers MS-free. The military intell community knows very well how completely worthless Windows is for mission-critical functions. Unfortunately, the rest of the military sometimes forgets. Wasn't a cruiser knocked out by a BSOD last year?
The development and deployment cycle for Naval systems is on an entirely different time scale than the norm, even in the military. Navy systems get upgraded when a ship comes into port, if there is time and resources available at that portcall. Considering the current operations tempo (optempo for the buzzword-impressed), about 1 or 2 intell ships get upgraded per year. They won't tell me how many total ships there are, but I know it's more than a dozen. So, just the installations will take 10 years, if nothing goes wrong and there's no major war.
If there's a war, nobody gets upgrades if they're needed in the theater, or as immediate backup to the fleet in the theater. Makes time schedules rather flexible.
Nope, still slow as snail spit. Might be because they're trying to hide. The intel comms system I'm testing next year refuses to talk directly to subs, so they have to condense messages, strip headers, and send the summaries to the subs. The other ships in the fleet get the full messages, and I think carriers are getting video chat or something by now.:-)
As an aside, why are you still using spacer images? Are you seeing a different demographic in your usage logs than I see in mine? I have such an insignificant number of visitors that use a browser so old that spacer images are a good idea, I don't bother. The spacing syntax in CSS is a much better solution, IMHO.
Unfortunately, no. They were using the Flash 2/3 format, and their menus were completely inoperative on my work computer, since the LAN ops guys have disabled many plugins as well as scripting.
The majority of military sites (at least small ones) are managed by people with no training in web design, just a copy of Frontpage and an order telling them to post the commander's photo right away. The older versions of FP made all buttons for navigation Java applets by default, which means the majority of small military sites don't comply with a federal law written in 1999. Left hand, right hand...
Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape 7 all have the option to set a minimum font size. IE is the only major browser that doesn't allow this.
Also, all three of the major "alternative" browsers have a zoom function that makes fonts larger regardless of the point-size set by the web designer. IE is the only major browser that will NEVER make a 8-point font bigger than 8-points without overriding the entire font structure for the page.
Considering how many newbie (or rude maybe) web designers assume that their pages will never be viewed by anyone with a resolution greater than 800x600, I'm a big fan of the Minimum Font Size option in my chosen browser. I obviously don't choose IE.:-)
The law doesn't apply to private sites. There is a section of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508, that addresses web accessibility. Section 508 applies to any site that receives government funding.
However, there is a reasonable expectation that web sites won't exclude a subset of customers. This is not being addressed through any criminal process, but through various civil cases brought against individual sites. One of the most famous, of course, was the Olympic site debacle, for two iterations of the Games. After the 2000 games site was sued for not having such basics as alt-tags or a text-based menu, the 2002 games committed the same mistakes. It's just good web design to allow your code to gracefully degrade, rather than break in anything but the newest and most-overloaded browser.
I know a bit about Section 508 because I've had to do web design for DoD the past several years. Many other DoD sites, I've noticed, claim compliance while using a Flash-based menu or Java applets for buttons. Clueless.
Auto-update may be a promising feature, if it weren't for the distressing frequency of Windows patches to break previously functioning systems.
There's a reason why responsible system administrators always test Windows service packs before deploying them. Some bugs have been rather infamous, for those who remember the NT service packs.
Linux 2.4 is the current kernel, and has been released for operational use over a year now.
Windows XP is the current release of Windows, and the XP-series of kernels has been out about the same length of time as the Linux 2.4 kernel.
So, they're nearly the same age.
If the author wants to claim that Linux is newer than Windows, he must mean that Linux has not been around as long as the pre-95 series of Windows, which was not an OS but merely a shell to DOS. So, Linux development is older than the current development tree that Windows is based on, whether the Win9x/ME kernel or the NT/XP kernel.
Of course, maybe I just can't operate a calendar - I'm no professional journalist after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Opera as my primary browser, and have Netscape 7, Phoenix, Mozilla and IE on my system. I resort to NS7 if something is inoperative in Opera (when I was using O6). Hopefully, I won't have to do that with O7, but we'll see.
I use IE to check if a page I've written looks good or not. Meanwhile, my web stats say that Opera has about 1% of the market, NS/Moz about 2%, and the rest is IE. Gotta love competition.
Wonder why MS is only trying to break Opera and not NS/Mozilla.
I love the bald-faced lying that MS pulls out for this behavior. "We're heavily invested in following standards." or "We're trying to produce the best site for all viewers." Yeah, right. Explain why there would be any reason at all to force every child entity 30 pixels to the left of its parent. For that matter, why does MSN still use the tired old hack of sending different pages to each browser? I don't need 4 versions of my site to handle every viewer. Amazing.
Not to mention that bookstores seem to think that all SF readers want to see 800 different Star XXXX books, most completely indistinguishible from each other. Maybe they should have a Sci-Fi section next to the Science Fiction section. Those of us that know better would steer well clear of that sci-fi crap, letting the Lucas and Spielberg-raised Sci-Fi "fans" get their fill of that dreck. :-)
If you're using "SF" to refer to Science Fiction, which is the most common breakout, rather than Speculative Fiction, you're missing the boat entirely with the books you have mentioned. Sounds like you want FANTASY books.
If you are looking for unusual well-written fantasy, check out Storm Constantine. The Wraethu omnibus edition is usually available, and it's a stunning piece of gothic fantasy alternate-reality post-apocalyptic gender-bending writing. Can't get enough hyphens.
For science fiction work, of course there's Neal Stephenson, and the recently feted Cory Doctorow. You can't go wrong with the classics of Heinlein and Asimov, of course.
Beyond that, as others have said, try something outside the F&SF realm. Or, if you can't bring yourself to do that, subscribe to Analog, Asimov's or F&SF to get a taste of new authors. Short fiction is like the snack before you dig into a big meaty novel.
Fireworks is, by far, the predominant web-designer tool for making small cross-platform compatible animations (rollovers, animated GIFs, etc).
Dreamweaver is preferred by all but the most masochistic of web-designers for making clean HTML-compatible code and for linking to a variety of database back-ends or scripting languages (support for PHP, CFM, etc).
Picture, if you will, the usual MS code-bloat and flash-over-usability on those programs. Gone will be the simple blank-page on startup, replaced with an annoying Wizard you can't get rid of for love or money. Gone will be cross-platform compatibility, in favor of Windows-only nonsense. And, the help agents! I don't think I could stand Dreamweaver MX-XP 2004 with some dumb paperclip or puppy telling me how to code an SQL connection.
Interesting that web designers that get paid to produce large numbers of clean, cross-platform, HTML-standard pages use Dreamweaver then. How interesting indeed, if Dreamweaver produces "crap html code" that the normal output of a Dreamweaver MX coding session can pass the HTML 4.01 strict tests with nary a blink.
Perhaps you just enjoy the masochism inherent in hand-coding.
Or duplication, maybe?
Did you have some other way to keep plain-text documents secure from bad guys yet open to the general public?
The differing philosophies of police and military come into play when the government decides that the Army should assist a local police force. The Police are trained to use minimum force to attain pacification and control. The military is trained to use overwhelming force to gain control in the minimum time possible. Also, the military is taught to minimize collateral damage, while the police are taught that collateral damage is unacceptable.
So, imagine the difference in how those two groups would handle, for example, a hostage situation.
Your information is slightly inaccurate. The Director of NSA has never ignored the Congressional Intelligence Oversight committee. He has, however, ignored on occasion a summons to testify in open session about things which are classified.
DIRNSA (at least the current Director) has been very cooperative with the Congress, as they do control his budget. He makes regular reports to the Security Council, as well as sporadic testimony to closed sessions and the very rare open session.
The oversight machinery in place to monitor DCI and DIRNSA is quite formidable, but it is, by its very nature, mostly invisible to the normal citizenry. It is a sad fact that countries do not have friends, only interests. Because of that, anything that a sufficiently large group knows (i.e., the US populace), so would people that you'd rather not know.
Of course the citizens don't know what the NSA is up to. If we knew, so would Bin Laden, Hussein, Prince Saud, and anyone else who is interested in thwarting those efforts.
The hardest part for most people to understand about intelligence is how fragile it is. SIGINT can provide amazingly detailed information about our adversaries, but it can be denied so much more easily and cheaply than it can be gained.
Of course the NSA is secretive. It's all about protecting the source. If the public knew exactly what the NSA's capabilities were, so would the enemies of the USA (and don't kid yourself that we have no enemies). It is infinitely easier to lose a source than to exploit one.
Here's an example I used in my basic intelligence class, for new recruits: KAL 007. For those out of high school, you should remember Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983. The USSR shot the passenger plane down for straying into Soviet airspace. The NSA had recordings of exactly what the pilots of those MIGs were saying, proving that they knew the plane was a passenger jet and not a spy plane. The recordings also proved that the commander of that unit ordered the shootdown, and it was not a rogue pilot acting without orders. This is pretty damaging material, right? But, as soon as it became public, the Soviets would change their radio security systems, probably blocking any intercept of their TacAir for months or years to come. The President makes those decisions, nobody lower. President Reagan, with advice from his security council (including big daddy DIRNSA), decided that embarrassing the Soviets and proving their official culpability in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians was worth the loss of Soviet tacair intercepts.
I worked with SIGINT for 12 years, and there is no doubt in my mind that DIRNSA is working in the best interests of the American people as a whole. Was this particular speech scripted? Of course, but then so is everything else in public sessions when dealing with intelligence. About 80% of what the NSA does is classified at levels that very few people even know exist, much less have access to. For good reason, too.
With all that said, I believe a healthy skepticism of our federal government is a good thing, an essential thing. A democracy cannot remain clean if the citizenry become sheep. Power corrupts, and there are few able to contain their greed for more power, if not for the watchful oversight of concerned citizens.
Part of the Coastal Conservation Act, from 1974 I believe. Basically states that the coast from Santa Barbara to San Francisco shall not be developed beyond certain very minimal allowable actions.
Makes the coast between SB and SF not look like the port of San Pedro, which is a Good Thing.
You are correct. My error.
Sorry for not replying sooner, but Anonymous Cowards don't generate message notifications.
First, I have to agree that most weblogs and almost all Livejournals are complete and utter shit.
:-)
However, the Livejournal community is similar to the BBS communities many of us old farts remember. The ability to search for someone in a centralized database of interests and geography is a way to find others of similar mindset, or an interesting mindset anyway.
Coincidentally, I just wrote a short essay about how Livejournal differs from other "blogs" (I hate that word).
A lot of LJ users know each other, or they set up meetings, much like our old BBS meetings. So, they're not writing for the general public, they're writing for their friends. If someone else finds them interesting enough to watch, good; if not, oh well.
The demographics on LJ, though, are scary. The majority of the users are 15-year-old girls. That's a good indication of the writing to expect on any random journal.
I only see a small piece of the Navy's IT structure, primarily the systems that deal with intelligence collection and dissemination. The current development system runs on Solaris 2.8, and they allow clients running Windows to connect, but the developers don't like it. Current military developers (I work with Joint, Navy and AF) seem to have a great love of using Java for the interface controls. This allows any properly-configured client on a network to access the server, and then the geeks can keep their servers MS-free. The military intell community knows very well how completely worthless Windows is for mission-critical functions. Unfortunately, the rest of the military sometimes forgets. Wasn't a cruiser knocked out by a BSOD last year?
The development and deployment cycle for Naval systems is on an entirely different time scale than the norm, even in the military. Navy systems get upgraded when a ship comes into port, if there is time and resources available at that portcall. Considering the current operations tempo (optempo for the buzzword-impressed), about 1 or 2 intell ships get upgraded per year. They won't tell me how many total ships there are, but I know it's more than a dozen. So, just the installations will take 10 years, if nothing goes wrong and there's no major war.
If there's a war, nobody gets upgrades if they're needed in the theater, or as immediate backup to the fleet in the theater. Makes time schedules rather flexible.
Nope, still slow as snail spit. Might be because they're trying to hide. The intel comms system I'm testing next year refuses to talk directly to subs, so they have to condense messages, strip headers, and send the summaries to the subs. The other ships in the fleet get the full messages, and I think carriers are getting video chat or something by now. :-)
As an aside, why are you still using spacer images? Are you seeing a different demographic in your usage logs than I see in mine? I have such an insignificant number of visitors that use a browser so old that spacer images are a good idea, I don't bother. The spacing syntax in CSS is a much better solution, IMHO.
Unfortunately, no. They were using the Flash 2/3 format, and their menus were completely inoperative on my work computer, since the LAN ops guys have disabled many plugins as well as scripting.
The majority of military sites (at least small ones) are managed by people with no training in web design, just a copy of Frontpage and an order telling them to post the commander's photo right away. The older versions of FP made all buttons for navigation Java applets by default, which means the majority of small military sites don't comply with a federal law written in 1999. Left hand, right hand...
Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape 7 all have the option to set a minimum font size. IE is the only major browser that doesn't allow this.
:-)
Also, all three of the major "alternative" browsers have a zoom function that makes fonts larger regardless of the point-size set by the web designer. IE is the only major browser that will NEVER make a 8-point font bigger than 8-points without overriding the entire font structure for the page.
Considering how many newbie (or rude maybe) web designers assume that their pages will never be viewed by anyone with a resolution greater than 800x600, I'm a big fan of the Minimum Font Size option in my chosen browser. I obviously don't choose IE.
The law doesn't apply to private sites. There is a section of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508, that addresses web accessibility. Section 508 applies to any site that receives government funding.
However, there is a reasonable expectation that web sites won't exclude a subset of customers. This is not being addressed through any criminal process, but through various civil cases brought against individual sites. One of the most famous, of course, was the Olympic site debacle, for two iterations of the Games. After the 2000 games site was sued for not having such basics as alt-tags or a text-based menu, the 2002 games committed the same mistakes. It's just good web design to allow your code to gracefully degrade, rather than break in anything but the newest and most-overloaded browser.
I know a bit about Section 508 because I've had to do web design for DoD the past several years. Many other DoD sites, I've noticed, claim compliance while using a Flash-based menu or Java applets for buttons. Clueless.
Auto-update may be a promising feature, if it weren't for the distressing frequency of Windows patches to break previously functioning systems.
There's a reason why responsible system administrators always test Windows service packs before deploying them. Some bugs have been rather infamous, for those who remember the NT service packs.
Let's compare two similar items, the kernels.
Linux 2.4 is the current kernel, and has been released for operational use over a year now.
Windows XP is the current release of Windows, and the XP-series of kernels has been out about the same length of time as the Linux 2.4 kernel.
So, they're nearly the same age.
If the author wants to claim that Linux is newer than Windows, he must mean that Linux has not been around as long as the pre-95 series of Windows, which was not an OS but merely a shell to DOS. So, Linux development is older than the current development tree that Windows is based on, whether the Win9x/ME kernel or the NT/XP kernel.
Of course, maybe I just can't operate a calendar - I'm no professional journalist after all.
Did they spell it like they were British, maybe? At least that would be a valid alternative.
Um, you misused "it's" in your subject about misuse of words. I love a good irony.