<flame>
If users look at GTK and wonder why it's so ugly, do they also look at KDE and wonder why it can implement fade-in menus with transparent windows, anti-aliasing, and ten thousand other shiny effects, but its word processor can't import MS Word documents correctly?
</flame>
If Windows 95 proved anything, it's that looks DON'T matter; applications with the features the users want will get you the market share even if looking at your GUI turns users to stone.
Now, if you want a flamewar, keep posting. If you really want what you say, then tell the GTK guys to work on making their GUI pretty (GNOME 2 helped a lot) and tell the KDE team that applications matter.
Then you're going to have to accept that you're pretty atypical...what kind of hardware/setup are you trying to run on and what sort of specific problems do you have?
And I've used every version of Windows from 3.11 for Workgroups up through XP; I still prefer Linux on my desktop.
Well, then, by all means use it. I wasn't saying IE 5 correctly implements the property, only that it understands it and thus the CENTER tag is unnecessary and ought to be replaced by CSS.
I've been using Linux on the desktop for two and a half years, with very few glitches. The vast majority of things work out of the package. The rest take only a bit of tweaking (MPlayer excepted). To me, your situation is atypical for Linux, and makes me wonder what distro/version you were running and when; nothing gets me more riled than people who complain about, say, X configuration when they haven't used a Linux distro since 1999.
Hmm...I'll just install a game on my Windows box...what's this? Missing required DLL? Need to upgrade DirectX? Need to upgrade video card drivers? Need a better video card? Need to configure IPX support? What? Oh well, I'll stick to Linux, there I type 'rpm -ivh' or 'apt-get install' and it Just Works(TM).
Moral of the story: every OS has its hell. Maybe you like Windows, that's fine. But don't tout it as being a magical shiny place where nothing ever goes wrong, because it isn't.
Oddly enough, none of those were errors in the validator result linked to - it barfed on two CENTER tags and what looked like an incorrectly nested P tag. So there are theoretically a couple things that could be fixed (AFAIK, even 4.0 browsers understand "text-align: center") and help at least a few pages validate (the more the better)...
This is the thing you're missing here...this is not anything to do with the scrollbar somehow being part of the content or "user data"; this is the scrollbar appearing and taking up screen space, which is inevitable; would you rather it obstruct content?. I prefer Mozilla's behavior to, say, a space reserved which would be empty otherwise, since that could make right-aligned elements look bad or possibly even throw them off.
And again, you are trying to control the user agent.
And not at all "unpolished" or "unfinished". When I am using an application and it does not need a scrollbar, I expect the scrollbar to not exist. When a scrollbar becomes necessary, I expect one to appear. I also expect that since the scrollbar takes up screen real estate, the viewing area of my application will be decreased by the size of the scrollbar.
That seems quite logical to me. And it's exactly what Mozilla does. If you dislike that, it's your prerogative. But it's not a serious issue to a lot of people, the Mozilla developers included.
But to reiterate, what you apparently want is to control the user agent; rather than understand the quite logical reason why this behavior happens and adapt to it, you wish to dictate the UA behavior and have it conform to you. This is, in my mind, a serious no-no of web development.
This is a fundamental rule which you are flaunting. As I've said, if you need things to always be exactly the same width, you must specify their sizes absolutely. You might even want to resort to JavaScript to resize the viewing area.
But when you persist in complaining, you remind me all too much of people who put notices up that their sites are "best viewed" on a particular OS/browser/version/resolution/color depth, and that's hallmark bad web design.
Having read the comments on the Bugzilla page and the comments in this thread, I have to say you're in the wrong. If you absolutely, unavoidably need two elements to have exactly the same visual width, you need to be specifying widths in pixels. If you rely on relative widths, you subject yourself to this sort of problem and shouldn't complain about it.
In addition, you seem to be ranting a lot about "expected" behavior...for me, what Mozilla does is the expected behavior. Can you point me to something in the W3C CSS or HTML/XHTML specs that says Mozilla is doing it wrong?
I know this article fits right in with Bash Microsoft Day (everyday!!) but I urge you to reconsider. The Netscape browser is trashy and they're giving out the pieces of the code which nobody could benefit from. No one is going to use their code in other projects because their browser is substandard, so it's a bit like being able to fuck an elderly, ugly whore for free... sure, it's free, but who gives a rat's ass?
</sarcasm>
Ah, the vaporware charge. Someone else already pointed out further up the page that it's being a little rough to call something vaporware when the announcement is that it will be released within the next two days; give them a break on that one maybe?
As for MPlayer, I've tried repeatedly to use it. I can even get it installed. Unfortunately, after that it simply refuses to play things. Never mind that I have plenty of open-source codecs available and even a resonably up-to-date set of DLLs ripped straight out of a Win98 partition - MPlayer won't play things, and when it does they're screwed up (i.e., RM and MOV tend to play at 2-3 times normal speed). I want a player that actually works, doesn't take sixty obscure command-line configuration flags, and supports the formats I want to play. MPLayer doesn't do that - they're probably still too busy accusing Red Hat of sabotaging them by using GCC 2.96 to care about improving their software.
So rather than switch to an open-source player that uses proprietary codecs, you'll use a buggy, nearly-impossible-to-configure-and-install open-source player that uses proprietary codecs. Sounds like a great plan to me...
A good friend of mine's dad works at the USPTO as a patent examiner...he's a very intelligent, well-read and well-rounded engineer. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, when all the guys like him retire (and there arent many left even now), that's the end; they can get three or four cheap idiots fresh out of college with no experience for the salary a qualified examiner can command, and that's common practice for replacing an examiner.
So please don't put all the blame on the patent examiners; while there are plenty of idiot examiners, a lot of this also has to do with bureaucracy's normal functioning: higher-ups trying to cut corners and save a buck.
Plenty of options - perhaps the review copies were only distributed on CD for some reason, perhaps Eugenia asked for the CD version (not everybody has a DVD drive, she may have wanted to do the CD install in order to get a feel for what the average user will go through)...I could come up with good possibilities all day.
Indeed. I use a Commodore 64, and I demand that Netscape support my platform as well! In fact, let's all boycott Netscape until they support every operating system ever produced, anywhere. If it can't run on my mock-up of Colossus or ENIAC, then it must not be a very good program...
You make it sound like KDE suddenly doesn't work anymore...dude, they removed a stupid little box that serves no useful purpose and changed the default theme. Oh God, run, KDE's broken to hell and back now...
I've been running Red Hat for two years now. Where's the "dependency hell" everybody talks about? I've gone from 7.0 to 7.3, doing each upgrade in turn, installed all sorts of stuff in between upgrades, never had any problems. So I have some issues with what you call a "typical" install on Linux...
OK, did I say somewhere Linux is absolutely secure? Nope. I said one simple thing - it's harder to exploit Linux than Windows. Where's your beef with that? If you want to quote the possibility of all sorts of unknown exploits, I'll ask how you sleep at night with all the millions of unknown terrorists who might be lurking outside your door, waiting for an opportunity to crash a 747 into you.
So seriously, what's your problem? Linux is not 100% secure, but I'll be damned if you can tell me it's as bad as Windows, which is a heck of a lot easier to exploit. One look at my web server logs will tell you that - I have thousands of Code Red, and about five of the Apache worm. To me that says Linux is doing something better than Windows.
Windows - Write five lines of code, stick them in an HTML email and wait for people's mail clients to execute it.
Linux - Spend a LOT of time tinkering, examining the source, experimenting, writing one test exploit after another, get one that works. Then release it and have it work against the n% of Linux users running that particular service, that particular version, probably on that particular distro.
I didn't say it was invincible, just that IMO it takes more skill, time, and effort to crack Linux. Why? Because Linux boxes get patched quickly and still tend to be run by people with at least half a clue about security. That means a vulnerability lasts a couple weeks at the most, whereas clueless users and Microsoft's inherently insecure coding practices have opened up the combination of buggy software and systems that go unpatched for years. Hence, Windows = easy to crack. Linux = harder to crack.
But it have to take the form of "Hi, I am an attachment. Please download me to a local disk, chmod me to be executable, and then run me with administrator privileges, you can trust me, really", seeing as Linux e-mail clients don't have the kind of Mack-truck-sized-security-hole access that Outlook and other MS clients have.
Odds of it happening? Not that likely. Windows is so easy to exploit that my grandmother could probably write a virus and get it to replicate and spread worldwide through Outlook/IE holes. On Linux/UNIX/etc. you at least have to try usually and know something about the system to write a viable exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
Closing a pop-up window takes time. And as we know, time is money; hence when you pop up a window you cost me money. Expect a bill soon.
<flame>
If users look at GTK and wonder why it's so ugly, do they also look at KDE and wonder why it can implement fade-in menus with transparent windows, anti-aliasing, and ten thousand other shiny effects, but its word processor can't import MS Word documents correctly?
</flame>
If Windows 95 proved anything, it's that looks DON'T matter; applications with the features the users want will get you the market share even if looking at your GUI turns users to stone.
Now, if you want a flamewar, keep posting. If you really want what you say, then tell the GTK guys to work on making their GUI pretty (GNOME 2 helped a lot) and tell the KDE team that applications matter.
And I've used every version of Windows from 3.11 for Workgroups up through XP; I still prefer Linux on my desktop.
Well, then, by all means use it. I wasn't saying IE 5 correctly implements the property, only that it understands it and thus the CENTER tag is unnecessary and ought to be replaced by CSS.
I've been using Linux on the desktop for two and a half years, with very few glitches. The vast majority of things work out of the package. The rest take only a bit of tweaking (MPlayer excepted). To me, your situation is atypical for Linux, and makes me wonder what distro/version you were running and when; nothing gets me more riled than people who complain about, say, X configuration when they haven't used a Linux distro since 1999.
Moral of the story: every OS has its hell. Maybe you like Windows, that's fine. But don't tout it as being a magical shiny place where nothing ever goes wrong, because it isn't.
Oddly enough, none of those were errors in the validator result linked to - it barfed on two CENTER tags and what looked like an incorrectly nested P tag. So there are theoretically a couple things that could be fixed (AFAIK, even 4.0 browsers understand "text-align: center") and help at least a few pages validate (the more the better)...
And again, you are trying to control the user agent.
That seems quite logical to me. And it's exactly what Mozilla does. If you dislike that, it's your prerogative. But it's not a serious issue to a lot of people, the Mozilla developers included.
But to reiterate, what you apparently want is to control the user agent; rather than understand the quite logical reason why this behavior happens and adapt to it, you wish to dictate the UA behavior and have it conform to you. This is, in my mind, a serious no-no of web development.
But when you persist in complaining, you remind me all too much of people who put notices up that their sites are "best viewed" on a particular OS/browser/version/resolution/color depth, and that's hallmark bad web design.
In addition, you seem to be ranting a lot about "expected" behavior...for me, what Mozilla does is the expected behavior. Can you point me to something in the W3C CSS or HTML/XHTML specs that says Mozilla is doing it wrong?
I know this article fits right in with Bash Microsoft Day (everyday!!) but I urge you to reconsider. The Netscape browser is trashy and they're giving out the pieces of the code which nobody could benefit from. No one is going to use their code in other projects because their browser is substandard, so it's a bit like being able to fuck an elderly, ugly whore for free... sure, it's free, but who gives a rat's ass?
</sarcasm>
As for MPlayer, I've tried repeatedly to use it. I can even get it installed. Unfortunately, after that it simply refuses to play things. Never mind that I have plenty of open-source codecs available and even a resonably up-to-date set of DLLs ripped straight out of a Win98 partition - MPlayer won't play things, and when it does they're screwed up (i.e., RM and MOV tend to play at 2-3 times normal speed). I want a player that actually works, doesn't take sixty obscure command-line configuration flags, and supports the formats I want to play. MPLayer doesn't do that - they're probably still too busy accusing Red Hat of sabotaging them by using GCC 2.96 to care about improving their software.
So rather than switch to an open-source player that uses proprietary codecs, you'll use a buggy, nearly-impossible-to-configure-and-install open-source player that uses proprietary codecs. Sounds like a great plan to me...
So please don't put all the blame on the patent examiners; while there are plenty of idiot examiners, a lot of this also has to do with bureaucracy's normal functioning: higher-ups trying to cut corners and save a buck.
Red Hat is good for this...use "rpm -K" to verify packages.
Plenty of options - perhaps the review copies were only distributed on CD for some reason, perhaps Eugenia asked for the CD version (not everybody has a DVD drive, she may have wanted to do the CD install in order to get a feel for what the average user will go through)...I could come up with good possibilities all day.
So perhaps the fact that she clearly didn't have the DVD is the reason she chose not to use it?
Indeed. I use a Commodore 64, and I demand that Netscape support my platform as well! In fact, let's all boycott Netscape until they support every operating system ever produced, anywhere. If it can't run on my mock-up of Colossus or ENIAC, then it must not be a very good program...
You make it sound like KDE suddenly doesn't work anymore...dude, they removed a stupid little box that serves no useful purpose and changed the default theme. Oh God, run, KDE's broken to hell and back now...
They have an article about this which mentions that the three certified versions are Red Hat 7.3, SuSE 8.0 Professional, and Mandrake ProSuite 8.2.
I've been running Red Hat for two years now. Where's the "dependency hell" everybody talks about? I've gone from 7.0 to 7.3, doing each upgrade in turn, installed all sorts of stuff in between upgrades, never had any problems. So I have some issues with what you call a "typical" install on Linux...
OK, did I say somewhere Linux is absolutely secure? Nope. I said one simple thing - it's harder to exploit Linux than Windows. Where's your beef with that? If you want to quote the possibility of all sorts of unknown exploits, I'll ask how you sleep at night with all the millions of unknown terrorists who might be lurking outside your door, waiting for an opportunity to crash a 747 into you.
So seriously, what's your problem? Linux is not 100% secure, but I'll be damned if you can tell me it's as bad as Windows, which is a heck of a lot easier to exploit. One look at my web server logs will tell you that - I have thousands of Code Red, and about five of the Apache worm. To me that says Linux is doing something better than Windows.
Compare Windows vs. Linux worm-writing:
Windows - Write five lines of code, stick them in an HTML email and wait for people's mail clients to execute it.
Linux - Spend a LOT of time tinkering, examining the source, experimenting, writing one test exploit after another, get one that works. Then release it and have it work against the n% of Linux users running that particular service, that particular version, probably on that particular distro.
I didn't say it was invincible, just that IMO it takes more skill, time, and effort to crack Linux. Why? Because Linux boxes get patched quickly and still tend to be run by people with at least half a clue about security. That means a vulnerability lasts a couple weeks at the most, whereas clueless users and Microsoft's inherently insecure coding practices have opened up the combination of buggy software and systems that go unpatched for years. Hence, Windows = easy to crack. Linux = harder to crack.
But it have to take the form of "Hi, I am an attachment. Please download me to a local disk, chmod me to be executable, and then run me with administrator privileges, you can trust me, really", seeing as Linux e-mail clients don't have the kind of Mack-truck-sized-security-hole access that Outlook and other MS clients have.
Odds of it happening? Not that likely. Windows is so easy to exploit that my grandmother could probably write a virus and get it to replicate and spread worldwide through Outlook/IE holes. On Linux/UNIX/etc. you at least have to try usually and know something about the system to write a viable exploit.