I'm not arguing with you, but what gases make up titan's atmosphere? that does make a difference.... (hence the "lighter than co2" qualification). also, although i am no expert on the matter, i would think the proximity and relative size of mars two moons would reduce its effective gravitational pull on its atmosphere...
according to another article that somebody else linked above, (here) this conclusion isn't based on an ongoing survey of the earth's magnetic field over the last 20 years (as implied by the observer article), but rather on the comparison of current data to a single set of data taken 20 years ago:
But Ørsted is the first satellite to take a snapshot of the Earth's magnetic field for 20 years, and such scant data makes it difficult to predict future shifts.
so while this may make a great shock news story (or hollywood movie plot) it hardly seems like anything approaching significant scientific research worth getting particularly alarmed about.
humans split off from the rest of the ape family something like 2 million years ago, so there have been "humans" of one type or another on this planet since then. the current species homo sapiens has populated this planet for a little less than the past (i think) 50,000 or so. (my memory on this second number is a bit fuzzy)
200,000 years ago i believe would roughly coincide with the appearance of the neanderthals.
And that makes it ok for us to speed the process along? Short-term self-interest uber alles.
correct me if i'm wrong, but the parent post never said or implied anything like that. you also quoted him out of context. the truth of the matter is that we do know that the earth's climate has varied dramatically in the past without our help. after all, a few thousand years ago, the city i was born in was under a glacier. and, as this article points out, a few hundred years ago the vikings established a flourishing colony in an area that is now nothing but ice and snow. on the other hand, we still have no proof that our existance on this planet has affected that cycle one tiny bit.
now i believe that we have had some affect on the earth's climate. we even have some scientific models that attempt to show how we have affected it. but nobody knows, and none of these models can help us understand, how significant that impact is. the parent post states that if all we have done is cause an ice age that would have happened anyway to happen a generation or two sooner, then we really haven't hurt anyone or anything too badly. all that changes is which generation has to live through it. sucks for them, but hey, it's good for their great-grandchildren who will be around when the ice age ends a generation ahead of when it otherwise would have....
If you gave me a computer, a day, and a completely random sequence of letters equal in length to Shakespeare's Hamlet, I could use that procedure to turn those random letters into Hamlet
indeeed you could- if you knew what outcome you were trying to achieve. if you just set about randomly flipping bits (er, letters) until you ended up with hamlet, you'd find that it would take much longer.
at any rate, this is besides the point. the parent posts question was, essentially, where did that hamlet lenght sequence of random characters come from? in your example, you are, as he stated, just making assumptions about your initial state, and moving from there. that fact that your start state was less similar to the end state than the cited professor's does not invalidate the point that your start state still sprang into being somehow. and we dont know how.
although your average windows user probably has little use for a terminal emulator, tera term pro (and it's ssh plugin) and putty both spring to my mind immediately when someone mentions open source windows software.
They did it so that a web page that is rendered in Linux looks the same as page rendered in OS X or Windoze...
that's absolutley ridiculous. they can use their own widgets to render a page without making the whle broser a monstrosity. after all, pages render the same in mozilla as they do in any of the various browsers that wrap the gecko engine with native interfaces. galeon's use of gtk widgets in the ui does not affect it's ability to render webpages the same as mozilla one bit.
> > Whilst the point about non-IE browsers not being able to access the site is valid,...
> That is a clear violation. They have developed code that depends on IE.
If you had read what the person who you are replying to had written, you might have noticed that you are in agreement with him on this point. His claim was only that it was invalid to state that a 5 hour download time was not making it accessible enough.
while i have little complaint with the general quality of epsons printers, i would warn you not to buy an epson inkjet if you are not going to use it frequently.
epson is one of the few inkjet makers that i know of whose ink nozzles are not a part of the replaceable cartridges. while this may sound like a good idea to cost conscious users, it also has the potential to cause a lot of trouble. whether due to the design of the nozzle or the formula of the ink, the ink has a tendency to dry out in the ink nozzles. unfortunatley, once this happens the only way to fix the problem is to have the entire print assembly replaced. every single person i've known has has owned an epson inkjet (including myself) has had it rendered useless within a year due to clogged nozzles.
perhaps hp's printer line has significantly deteriorated in recent years, but for me the deskjets have been some of the least troublesome electronic deveices i've ever used. my parents are still using their 7 year old 500C, and after my epson died, i bought a used 8(hundred-something) which has worked flawlessly for me ever since. maybe their quality died when they made the switch from white plastic boxes to grey swoopy things.
at any rate, out of the three manufacturers you list, i would reccommend canon. i don't know anything about their linux support (or if that's even important to you) but out of the three, i've had the least bad experiences with them. my girlfriend replaced her epson with a canon about a year ago and has been happy with it so far. (at least i haven't been called to figure out what's wrong with it yet) my dad also had one a while back that worked well for several years, although it did require a bit of care in handling (unusual considering it was marketed as a compact printer designed to be carried around with a laptop)
While you are right in the general case, you are only partially right in this case. It is true that you could invent the patented concept from scratch, with no knowledge of the patent or the work of the original inventor.
however, in this case, (if i'm reading alan's email correctly) that is not what happened. The person who alan is responding to was talking about implementing something he saw described in a paper published by sgi (or someone at sgi). but the author of that paper was granted a patent prior to the publishing of that paper.
so in this case, while they may not have been willfully violating the patent, they most certainly were using the invention somebody else had made- not inventing it again themselves.
hmm.... he probably said (or should have said) something like: "the Xbox version will have the "full graphics fidelity" of the PC version running at 640x480 on a 60Hz monitor."
It's possible, (and usually rather simple) to program a web page to take advantage of features not in all web pages without explicitly checking browser versions. The parent's point is that if you make your web page say "requires ie version x", then it's going to break when version x+1 comes out. guaranteed. if you make the browser require a feature in version x, rather than requiring a specific version, then your web page will still work when the next version comes out, assuming the feature hasn't been deprecated.
this is harder to do when you actually want to change the HTML code based on the browesr, but in most cases all you're changing is stylesheets or javascript code, which is much simpler. instead of putting "if (navigator.appVersion == x)" in your code, just do something like "if (function_that_i_want_to_use)"
this way you dont have to go back and change your code whenever a new browser is released, and it has the added side bonus of also being more likely to work in browsers that dont have a dominant marketshare but are in many ways feature compatible (i.e. konqueror and opera)
or you could get a dell i8000 series laptop at 1.6GHz with 1600x1200 resolution and a GeForce or Radeon video card (who even makes the video card for that voyager? somebody mentioned ali? no thanks...) for around $2300.
oh, and it weighs about 8 lb.
and if you really need the cool two screen factor, you can, as somebody else mentioned, stick a stripe of electrical down the middle of your lcd panel, and still have more screen real estate than 1536x1024.... or you could just buy two of them. still be cheaper, and not much heavier. and then you could beowulf them. er, forget i said that.
Is there anything you see in the XWT Mail demo or the widget sampler that couldn't be done in DHTML?
the short answer is no[1], the longer answer is that it depends on how patient you are.
the problem is that any widget more complicated than the basic html primitives needs to be hand rolled. relisitically, in the near future you may have to hand-roll your pulldowns too, since option elements in msie dont obey z-index attributes, making them impossible to cover up, which you may want to do in an mdi application for example. while this isn't too tough from a look standpoint, even using just <DIV> tags, getting the feel right is a lot more difficult. the event handling and event bubbling mechanisms supplied in javascript make getting the desired behavior from your custom widgets rather difficult at times. in the new version i am working on, i'm planning on using a few global event handlers that will overide all of the built in event handling and event bubbling. i just hope it doesn't slow the thing down too much to be useful.
another tricky point is that there is no IO in javascript. the only way i can do server interaction (loading files, etc.) is to load a page (it has to be from the same server as the application, due to javascript security policy) in a hidden iframe, and then grab the contents of that frame and delete it.
the biggest hurdle i've had in all this time, though, is just the fact that prior to this i've had little experience writing gui applications, and no experience designing toolkits, so it's taking me a few iterations to get to an api that is consistent and usable.
assuming i can get my event handling issues dealt with, there's only two serious shortcomings i see in writing low to mid complexity apps to run in a bowser. the first is the fact that you can only ever do load and save operations on the server where the application resides. (javascript security policy prevents exchanging data between frames whose content comes from different domains) this doesn't entirely rule out load and store of local data, but it does make it tricky. the second is the lack of any rich text editing facilities. the textarea widget is horribly deficient for most text editing needs. the first application i wrote was a gui ide for voiceXML, and dealing with the shortcomings of the textarea was awful. (especially in mozilla. but that was around 0.9.4. hopefully it's improved since then)
1) having taken a second look at the widget demo, i guess i have to take this back. i haven't tried, but i doubt you would be able to do the image tranparency thing correctly with current browsers. it may be possible with netscape, but i am almost positive that ie doesnt have any real support for alpha blending. you could easily have a bunch of draggable images, but you'd be stuck with gif on/off transparency. no cool blending effects.
Sorta.:) It's where HTML might be 5 years from now. Still can't resize a column without elaborate piles of browser specific JavaScript. The browsers are all broken one way or another. Frames are a pain in the ass to work around. Etc, etc. The Mozilla and W3 folks have this as a vision. Problem is it'll take them to another half decade to get there.
actually you can do this with html now. i've been writing applications like this using DHTML/Javascript for over a year now, and they work just fine on both ie5.5+ and mozilla. (they dont work on opera 5 because it doesnt support document.createElement(). havent tried opera 6 yet) yes, dealing directly with the DOM sucks, but if you tried to write the gimp using only xlib functions, that would suck pretty bad too. once you have a decent framework, you can write real applications dealing only with javascript. (still a horrid language, but the only one you can use in a browser without plugins)
hopefully, i'll have an open sourced toolkit for writing js apps done by fall and then you can all take a look at it and compare it to this.
neat looking mail client, tho.....
double click on title bar makes window fly
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 1
at least that was the bug description in our company bug tracking system (a whiteboard mounted on the wall accross from my desk)
we were writing an mdi aplication in javascript (complete with draggable/resizeable windows) and double-clicking on a window title bar would snap the top left corner of the window to the mouse cursor position, thus causing the window to "fly" accross the screen.
it wasn't until my next job some six months later that i finally figured out that the second onMouseDown event started processing before the first onMouseUp event finished, and i was clobbering the values for the position of the window at the beginning of the drag before i was doing final positioning of the window.
we had another one at the top of the list for some time saying that our product "needs more user friends" - our ceo's horrible typo of an attempt to tell us that the product needed to be made more user-friendly.
another baffler that i encountered is the fact that select widgets totally ignore the z-index property in all version of internet explorer. they are always on top, period. it turns out this isn't actually a bug- it's a well(?)-documented feature. not that this feature makes any sense whatsoever. this of course makes implementing an mdi application that uses pulldowns in the windows a bit difficult, to say the least, because the pulldowns from lower windows will "bleed-through" and obscure the contents of the focused window, unless you do some fancy tricks.
perhaps you dont remember this, or weren't working in html at the time, but netscape versions before 4.x (3.x and i believe 2.x as well) also implicitly closed the tr and td tags. i was an anal bastard and closed all of my tags anyway, but my best friend, who started coding in html around the same time as me swore up and down that the closing tags were optional.
of course six months later when ns4 was released all of his web pages stopped working.
ns4 was kinda the gcc 2.96 of the browser world. they abandoned backward compatibility in the name of progress, but released too early to be truly forward compatible.
Microsoft has managed to completely destroy any hopes of Java being a great client-side language -- by including an incompatible version of Java, then not including it, and then including that same ancient crappy version again.
actually, i think sun had already pretty much destroyed java's hopes of becoming a great client-side language when they made it suck.
Also, Your list of things not to do to catch a virus reminds me like avoiding pregnancy via the 'pull out' method. Sure it might improve your chances, but it won't 'protect' you in any real sense.
actually, i'd say that it's more like trying to avoid pregnancy by using a condom. yes there is still risk, and even the moderately intelligent people know that the risk is still there, but it's pretty small, and typically all but the most paranoid are willing to live with that level of risk.
i've been using windows without any form of antivirus software for something like five years now and never caught a virus. i haven't even had to worry about antivirus software since i stopped using floppies. for those of you that have never had the joy of being given a floppy with an infected boot record (or using one of your floppies in another computer with an infected boot record), they are truly nasty things, and several orders of magnitude more clever than any of today's crop of vb worms. and they are the only kind of virus so far that i have been unable to avoid simply by using common sense- since the virus is in the boot record of the disk, there's no executable to run; just putting it in your drive will infect you.
it may not be a big step, but it is a useful step. now i can finally keep windows messenger from starting up everytime i start up outlook express, for example.
while the programs wll still be installed, preventing them from running does mean more than just deleting the start menu shortcut....
the big problem with this, which im surprised that nobody has pointed out yet, is that in icq you are identified by your id# and in aim, you are identified by your login name. It follows then that your user name must be unique in aim, but not in icq. there's not really an easy way to combine the two that will keep everyone happy. if you give everyone on aim an id number, you open the aim network up to the same spam problems that plague icq: anyone can just start sending out messages to large blocks of random numbers. and if you make it so all of the icq people are identified to everyone by their uin, you have two problems: 1) people arent good at remembering more or less random 7-10 digit numbers. 2) you might have a problem where some freak of an im user signed up up to use a number as a screen name that is also an icq uin.
Who can blame RMS for feeling a little bitter about it - if not for his sake, then for that of all the other GNU developers whose work and effort is often trivialised? How many of us would enjoy seeing our efforts appropriated by others without due credit being given, and particularly without our beliefs - central to our reasons for developing the software in the first place - being given proper consideration?
if this is what he's after, maybe he should have added a naming clause to the gpl, sorta like the old bsd advertising clause. as it is, he didn't. he gave away his software for the world to use. and now he's throwing a hissy fit because somebody else used it and didn't name it after him. as someone mentioned before, if fsf had considered adopting linux as part of the gnu project instead of continuing to hack away at hurd version 0.x, then they could name it whatever they want, but now linux is just another collection of software that includes/uses the gnu tools, just like *BSD or cygwin.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not arguing with you, but what gases make up titan's atmosphere? that does make a difference.... (hence the "lighter than co2" qualification).
also, although i am no expert on the matter, i would think the proximity and relative size of mars two moons would reduce its effective gravitational pull on its atmosphere...
er...
"When you must fit your data to a line...."
shoulda previewed the subject along with the comment, i guess.
be sure to use only two data points.
according to another article that somebody else linked above, (here) this conclusion isn't based on an ongoing survey of the earth's magnetic field over the last 20 years (as implied by the observer article), but rather on the comparison of current data to a single set of data taken 20 years ago:
But Ørsted is the first satellite to take a snapshot of the Earth's magnetic field for 20 years, and such scant data makes it difficult to predict future shifts.
so while this may make a great shock news story (or hollywood movie plot) it hardly seems like anything approaching significant scientific research worth getting particularly alarmed about.
humans split off from the rest of the ape family something like 2 million years ago, so there have been "humans" of one type or another on this planet since then. the current species homo sapiens has populated this planet for a little less than the past (i think) 50,000 or so. (my memory on this second number is a bit fuzzy)
200,000 years ago i believe would roughly coincide with the appearance of the neanderthals.
And that makes it ok for us to speed the process along? Short-term self-interest uber alles.
correct me if i'm wrong, but the parent post never said or implied anything like that. you also quoted him out of context. the truth of the matter is that we do know that the earth's climate has varied dramatically in the past without our help. after all, a few thousand years ago, the city i was born in was under a glacier. and, as this article points out, a few hundred years ago the vikings established a flourishing colony in an area that is now nothing but ice and snow. on the other hand, we still have no proof that our existance on this planet has affected that cycle one tiny bit.
now i believe that we have had some affect on the earth's climate. we even have some scientific models that attempt to show how we have affected it. but nobody knows, and none of these models can help us understand, how significant that impact is. the parent post states that if all we have done is cause an ice age that would have happened anyway to happen a generation or two sooner, then we really haven't hurt anyone or anything too badly. all that changes is which generation has to live through it. sucks for them, but hey, it's good for their great-grandchildren who will be around when the ice age ends a generation ahead of when it otherwise would have....
If you gave me a computer, a day, and a completely random sequence of letters equal in length to Shakespeare's Hamlet, I could use that procedure to turn those random letters into Hamlet
indeeed you could- if you knew what outcome you were trying to achieve. if you just set about randomly flipping bits (er, letters) until you ended up with hamlet, you'd find that it would take much longer.
at any rate, this is besides the point. the parent posts question was, essentially, where did that hamlet lenght sequence of random characters come from? in your example, you are, as he stated, just making assumptions about your initial state, and moving from there. that fact that your start state was less similar to the end state than the cited professor's does not invalidate the point that your start state still sprang into being somehow. and we dont know how.
although your average windows user probably has little use for a terminal emulator, tera term pro (and it's ssh plugin) and putty both spring to my mind immediately when someone mentions open source windows software.
They did it so that a web page that is rendered in Linux looks the same as page rendered in OS X or Windoze...
that's absolutley ridiculous. they can use their own widgets to render a page without making the whle broser a monstrosity. after all, pages render the same in mozilla as they do in any of the various browsers that wrap the gecko engine with native interfaces. galeon's use of gtk widgets in the ui does not affect it's ability to render webpages the same as mozilla one bit.
> > Whilst the point about non-IE browsers not being able to access the site is valid, ...
> That is a clear violation. They have developed code that depends on IE.
If you had read what the person who you are replying to had written, you might have noticed that you are in agreement with him on this point. His claim was only that it was invalid to state that a 5 hour download time was not making it accessible enough.
while i have little complaint with the general quality of epsons printers, i would warn you not to buy an epson inkjet if you are not going to use it frequently.
epson is one of the few inkjet makers that i know of whose ink nozzles are not a part of the replaceable cartridges. while this may sound like a good idea to cost conscious users, it also has the potential to cause a lot of trouble. whether due to the design of the nozzle or the formula of the ink, the ink has a tendency to dry out in the ink nozzles. unfortunatley, once this happens the only way to fix the problem is to have the entire print assembly replaced. every single person i've known has has owned an epson inkjet (including myself) has had it rendered useless within a year due to clogged nozzles.
perhaps hp's printer line has significantly deteriorated in recent years, but for me the deskjets have been some of the least troublesome electronic deveices i've ever used. my parents are still using their 7 year old 500C, and after my epson died, i bought a used 8(hundred-something) which has worked flawlessly for me ever since. maybe their quality died when they made the switch from white plastic boxes to grey swoopy things.
at any rate, out of the three manufacturers you list, i would reccommend canon. i don't know anything about their linux support (or if that's even important to you) but out of the three, i've had the least bad experiences with them. my girlfriend replaced her epson with a canon about a year ago and has been happy with it so far. (at least i haven't been called to figure out what's wrong with it yet) my dad also had one a while back that worked well for several years, although it did require a bit of care in handling (unusual considering it was marketed as a compact printer designed to be carried around with a laptop)
While you are right in the general case, you are only partially right in this case. It is true that you could invent the patented concept from scratch, with no knowledge of the patent or the work of the original inventor.
however, in this case, (if i'm reading alan's email correctly) that is not what happened. The person who alan is responding to was talking about implementing something he saw described in a paper published by sgi (or someone at sgi). but the author of that paper was granted a patent prior to the publishing of that paper.
so in this case, while they may not have been willfully violating the patent, they most certainly were using the invention somebody else had made- not inventing it again themselves.
hmm.... he probably said (or should have said) something like: "the Xbox version will have the "full graphics fidelity" of the PC version running at 640x480 on a 60Hz monitor."
It's possible, (and usually rather simple) to program a web page to take advantage of features not in all web pages without explicitly checking browser versions. The parent's point is that if you make your web page say "requires ie version x", then it's going to break when version x+1 comes out. guaranteed. if you make the browser require a feature in version x, rather than requiring a specific version, then your web page will still work when the next version comes out, assuming the feature hasn't been deprecated.
this is harder to do when you actually want to change the HTML code based on the browesr, but in most cases all you're changing is stylesheets or javascript code, which is much simpler. instead of putting "if (navigator.appVersion == x)" in your code, just do something like "if (function_that_i_want_to_use)"
this way you dont have to go back and change your code whenever a new browser is released, and it has the added side bonus of also being more likely to work in browsers that dont have a dominant marketshare but are in many ways feature compatible (i.e. konqueror and opera)
or you could get a dell i8000 series laptop at 1.6GHz with 1600x1200 resolution and a GeForce or Radeon video card (who even makes the video card for that voyager? somebody mentioned ali? no thanks...) for around $2300.
oh, and it weighs about 8 lb.
and if you really need the cool two screen factor, you can, as somebody else mentioned, stick a stripe of electrical down the middle of your lcd panel, and still have more screen real estate than 1536x1024.... or you could just buy two of them. still be cheaper, and not much heavier. and then you could beowulf them. er, forget i said that.
Is there anything you see in the XWT Mail demo or the widget sampler that couldn't be done in DHTML?
the short answer is no[1], the longer answer is that it depends on how patient you are.
the problem is that any widget more complicated than the basic html primitives needs to be hand rolled. relisitically, in the near future you may have to hand-roll your pulldowns too, since option elements in msie dont obey z-index attributes, making them impossible to cover up, which you may want to do in an mdi application for example. while this isn't too tough from a look standpoint, even using just <DIV> tags, getting the feel right is a lot more difficult. the event handling and event bubbling mechanisms supplied in javascript make getting the desired behavior from your custom widgets rather difficult at times. in the new version i am working on, i'm planning on using a few global event handlers that will overide all of the built in event handling and event bubbling. i just hope it doesn't slow the thing down too much to be useful.
another tricky point is that there is no IO in javascript. the only way i can do server interaction (loading files, etc.) is to load a page (it has to be from the same server as the application, due to javascript security policy) in a hidden iframe, and then grab the contents of that frame and delete it.
the biggest hurdle i've had in all this time, though, is just the fact that prior to this i've had little experience writing gui applications, and no experience designing toolkits, so it's taking me a few iterations to get to an api that is consistent and usable.
assuming i can get my event handling issues dealt with, there's only two serious shortcomings i see in writing low to mid complexity apps to run in a bowser. the first is the fact that you can only ever do load and save operations on the server where the application resides. (javascript security policy prevents exchanging data between frames whose content comes from different domains) this doesn't entirely rule out load and store of local data, but it does make it tricky. the second is the lack of any rich text editing facilities. the textarea widget is horribly deficient for most text editing needs. the first application i wrote was a gui ide for voiceXML, and dealing with the shortcomings of the textarea was awful. (especially in mozilla. but that was around 0.9.4. hopefully it's improved since then)
1) having taken a second look at the widget demo, i guess i have to take this back. i haven't tried, but i doubt you would be able to do the image tranparency thing correctly with current browsers. it may be possible with netscape, but i am almost positive that ie doesnt have any real support for alpha blending. you could easily have a bunch of draggable images, but you'd be stuck with gif on/off transparency. no cool blending effects.
Sorta. :) It's where HTML might be 5 years from now. Still can't resize a column without elaborate piles of browser specific JavaScript. The browsers are all broken one way or another. Frames are a pain in the ass to work around. Etc, etc. The Mozilla and W3 folks have this as a vision. Problem is it'll take them to another half decade to get there.
actually you can do this with html now. i've been writing applications like this using DHTML/Javascript for over a year now, and they work just fine on both ie5.5+ and mozilla. (they dont work on opera 5 because it doesnt support document.createElement(). havent tried opera 6 yet) yes, dealing directly with the DOM sucks, but if you tried to write the gimp using only xlib functions, that would suck pretty bad too. once you have a decent framework, you can write real applications dealing only with javascript. (still a horrid language, but the only one you can use in a browser without plugins)
hopefully, i'll have an open sourced toolkit for writing js apps done by fall and then you can all take a look at it and compare it to this.
neat looking mail client, tho.....
at least that was the bug description in our company bug tracking system (a whiteboard mounted on the wall accross from my desk)
we were writing an mdi aplication in javascript (complete with draggable/resizeable windows) and double-clicking on a window title bar would snap the top left corner of the window to the mouse cursor position, thus causing the window to "fly" accross the screen.
it wasn't until my next job some six months later that i finally figured out that the second onMouseDown event started processing before the first onMouseUp event finished, and i was clobbering the values for the position of the window at the beginning of the drag before i was doing final positioning of the window.
we had another one at the top of the list for some time saying that our product "needs more user friends" - our ceo's horrible typo of an attempt to tell us that the product needed to be made more user-friendly.
another baffler that i encountered is the fact that select widgets totally ignore the z-index property in all version of internet explorer. they are always on top, period. it turns out this isn't actually a bug- it's a well(?)-documented feature. not that this feature makes any sense whatsoever. this of course makes implementing an mdi application that uses pulldowns in the windows a bit difficult, to say the least, because the pulldowns from lower windows will "bleed-through" and obscure the contents of the focused window, unless you do some fancy tricks.
perhaps you dont remember this, or weren't working in html at the time, but netscape versions before 4.x (3.x and i believe 2.x as well) also implicitly closed the tr and td tags. i was an anal bastard and closed all of my tags anyway, but my best friend, who started coding in html around the same time as me swore up and down that the closing tags were optional.
of course six months later when ns4 was released all of his web pages stopped working.
ns4 was kinda the gcc 2.96 of the browser world. they abandoned backward compatibility in the name of progress, but released too early to be truly forward compatible.
Microsoft has managed to completely destroy any hopes of Java being a great client-side language -- by including an incompatible version of Java, then not including it, and then including that same ancient crappy version again.
actually, i think sun had already pretty much destroyed java's hopes of becoming a great client-side language when they made it suck.
Also, Your list of things not to do to catch a virus reminds me like avoiding pregnancy via the 'pull out' method. Sure it might improve your chances, but it won't 'protect' you in any real sense.
actually, i'd say that it's more like trying to avoid pregnancy by using a condom. yes there is still risk, and even the moderately intelligent people know that the risk is still there, but it's pretty small, and typically all but the most paranoid are willing to live with that level of risk.
i've been using windows without any form of antivirus software for something like five years now and never caught a virus. i haven't even had to worry about antivirus software since i stopped using floppies. for those of you that have never had the joy of being given a floppy with an infected boot record (or using one of your floppies in another computer with an infected boot record), they are truly nasty things, and several orders of magnitude more clever than any of today's crop of vb worms. and they are the only kind of virus so far that i have been unable to avoid simply by using common sense- since the virus is in the boot record of the disk, there's no executable to run; just putting it in your drive will infect you.
you can also learn application without theory, but then you get ... well, most Microsoft products, for example.
...or maybe something like Perl.
it may not be a big step, but it is a useful step. now i can finally keep windows messenger from starting up everytime i start up outlook express, for example.
while the programs wll still be installed, preventing them from running does mean more than just deleting the start menu shortcut....
the big problem with this, which im surprised that nobody has pointed out yet, is that in icq you are identified by your id# and in aim, you are identified by your login name. It follows then that your user name must be unique in aim, but not in icq. there's not really an easy way to combine the two that will keep everyone happy. if you give everyone on aim an id number, you open the aim network up to the same spam problems that plague icq: anyone can just start sending out messages to large blocks of random numbers. and if you make it so all of the icq people are identified to everyone by their uin, you have two problems: 1) people arent good at remembering more or less random 7-10 digit numbers. 2) you might have a problem where some freak of an im user signed up up to use a number as a screen name that is also an icq uin.
Who can blame RMS for feeling a little bitter about it - if not for his sake, then for that of all the other GNU developers whose work and effort is often trivialised? How many of us would enjoy seeing our efforts appropriated by others without due credit being given, and particularly without our beliefs - central to our reasons for developing the software in the first place - being given proper consideration?
if this is what he's after, maybe he should have added a naming clause to the gpl, sorta like the old bsd advertising clause. as it is, he didn't. he gave away his software for the world to use. and now he's throwing a hissy fit because somebody else used it and didn't name it after him. as someone mentioned before, if fsf had considered adopting linux as part of the gnu project instead of continuing to hack away at hurd version 0.x, then they could name it whatever they want, but now linux is just another collection of software that includes/uses the gnu tools, just like *BSD or cygwin.
I'll make you a deal, no strings attached. Quantify your "billions" figure and I'll give you a crisp $20 bill.
i realize that i am picking at nits here, but that is an attached string. and in this case a pretty big one, imo....
but i suppose that was your point, wasn't it?