I don't remember anything in the article referring to registered sex-offender status. Speculation or source?
Speculation, but speculation that's exceedingly likely to be correct. Look up the case of Glenarlow Wilson, a child in neighboring Georgia who will be registered as a child molester for the rest of his life, after serving a mandatory 10-year prison sentence -- because, at the age of 17, he had consensual oral sex with a 16-year-old girl. Georgia law at the time drew no distinction whatsoever about the age of the "molester"; any oral sex involving a minor, even if the partner was also a minor, was felony child molestation and left no room for judicial discretion in sentencing.
It's just that we also know he's basically getting paid to bash it and promote something else.
No, we know that he works for a company which develops a technology which does some of the things Java applets were supposedly going to do, back in the day. Not everyone who receives a paycheck is a shill who should be automatically discounted.
He is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall 1998, 2nd edition 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2006, see www.BruceEckel.com), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available at www.BruceEckel.com)
He was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee. He speaks regularly at conferences and was for many years the chair of both the C++ and Java tracks at the Software Development conference.
Thinking in Java also received the Jolt Award, for best book published in 2002, as well as the Java World Reader's Choice Award and Java World Editor's Choice Award for best book, the Java Developer's Journal Editor's Choice Award for books
Bruce was the "Java Alley" columnist for Web Techniques magazine
I'm not even a Java guy, and I know Bruce Eckel knows what he's talking about when it comes to Java. A shill he ain't.
Wow, kudos to the submitter and the article writer -- while speculative, it makes logical sense and uses existing evidence to predict future events.
Logic? Where is this logic of which you speak? Within the same article he argues that the iPhone won't sell because the iPod is better for media, and that the iPod won't sell because people will be buying iPhones instead. This is what passes for logic these days?
Why not just build packages than can be installed to the main Ubuntu distro(s) already out there?
It's easier for the end user to have something that gives them most or all of what they need out of the box, rather than forcing them to scour around for the packages they need to get their job done. And once you have a solid reusable core OS like Ubuntu, building specialized distros tailored to specific types of users isn't all that hard.
I'm not entirely certain. Sarbanes-Oxley, according to people I've talked to who've had to deal with it, is a horrifically bad piece of legislation which was hastily written in the wake of major accounting scandals; even now, over four years after its passage, no-one is still quite certain what it requires, and lots of companies are erring on the side of extreme caution so as not to be made examples of by government regulators (probably especially Apple, which is already under investigation for irregularities in its stock options).
If that were the case, wouldn't Apple just charge some symbolic amount? Perhaps $1?
Others have pointed in in threads above that (in the US at least) any credit-card transaction less than about $5 can be a net loss of money for the seller, because of the processing fees charged by the credit-card companies. The $4.99 price may actually mean that they're just breaking even on this, while still being able to say that they charged money for the "new product".
But then: they sell songs for $0.99 on iTMS. I can quite easily go and buy a single song on there (or rather, I would if I had a US postage address, which I don't, so I would pay £0.79 instead...). So why not pass it through the same system as iTMS, and charge the price of a song?
And yet I know -- from looking at my bank statements, since I'm using a debit card for the iTunes store -- that I'm not being charged immediately. If I go a relatively long period (say, a week) only buying one song, I do see a 99-cent charge, but if I buy more than that I see a single aggregate charge instead. So I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing their best to hold off on the charge until it's profitable to run it through; I've seen a number of physical businesses (particularly coffeeshops) hanging up notices that they won't accept credit/debit cards on charges less then $5.00, so it'd make sense for Apple to do the same.
This also makes more sense than the line of reasoning which says it's $4.99 to make it look "real" -- there is, for example, a long and storied tradition in the US of employees signing over patents to employers for a fee of $1.00 (since there's a requirement that the transfer be in return for some "consideration").
Got an actual source for that? All the hysteria I've ever seen has been fueled by people who misinterpret the Gmail terms of service to mean "we never delete anything" instead of "this stuff's stored on distributed redundant clusters, so sometimes there's a lag between hitting delete and the message disappearing".
They'd be scanning the text and headers of every message anyway, and pretty much every email provider on the planet does the same (how else are you expecting spam filters to work? Magic pixies who predict when spam will come in?). So why not use similar heuristics to automatically choose a contextually-relevant ad?
If you have a blocker that handles SSL ads, then let us know.
I just have a user stylesheet which handles all that sort of thing; it scans for anything matching an IAB ad size, and sets display: none. And over the years I've added more specific rules for common image and object source locations, which gets the advantage of Adblock in a much more portable fashion (since on my MacBook I prefer SafarI); I've also added some more customized rules for specific situations and sites. Works like a charm no matter where I'm browsing.
Jobs himself seems to be clean with respect to the stock-options fiasco, so I have a hard time seeing how he could be "forced out". And it seems highly unlikely at this point that Apple's board (which is a lot friendlier toward Jobs than the board which ousted him way back when -- these days, Apple is controlled almost entirely by friends of Steve) would ever want to get rid of him in the absence of legal force requiring it. A better hypothetical to pose is what would happen if/when Jobs ever decides to retire.
I can think of a few possible explanations for the lack of Leopard in the keynote:
Most of the developer-related changes in Leopard -- which are the ones that really need to be pre-announced -- are already out in the open, and have been since WWDC. So the iPhone got to take center stage at MacWorld and get all the attention.
A number of previews of 10.5 developer tools that I've seen are built to expire in July, which would seem to hint at a summer release; that would be closer to WWDC 2007, which would mean that's the logical time to demo the finalized OS (and also to announce new machines shipping with it preinstalled).
The main unresolved thing about Leopard is a hint Jobs dropped that there were UI changes on the way; the last time Apple did a significant UI refresh, they kept it secret until the last possible minute. If Leopard contains significant new UI, it wouldn't be surprising if they kept a lid on it again.
Adobe's Creative Suite 3 (including the much-clamored-for Intel-native Photoshop) is still in beta, and waiting to release 10.5 at around the same time as the final CS3 would give many Mac users who live and breathe Photoshop a compelling reason to upgrade immediately, boosting initial adoption.
Remember that Apple's been making buckets of money, for years, by selling things that either were or were perceived to be more expensive than the competition.
This technique requires the prior existence of a full-exploitable XSS hole before it can work; otherwise the script which modifies object prototypes never loads and never executes. Again, the author of this paper is simply saying, "if your site has an XSS hole I can use an XSS exploit against it". This would be akin to a physical security expert pronouncing that he can get into your house if you leave your doors and windows unlocked, and is not earth-shattering or insightful in any way; the only reason it's getting press is the mistaken belief that use of object prototypes constitutes a never-before-seen technique, and that's debatable; even if no-one's ever actually tried a real-world exploit with this technique, any JavaScript programmer with his or her salt knows it's possible.
The paper is quite insightful, and the author is almost blase about the whole thing. It's quite clear that he simply believes he's unearthed a new form of attack, and he's in fact quite correct.
No, the author has not actually unearthed anything new; the mutability of object prototypes is a well-known and well-understood aspect of JavaScript. The potential to cause unexpected behavior by changing the prototypes of built-in objects is likewise well-known and well-understood (and has been a source of complaint against a number of JavaScript libraries -- Prototype, for example, used to extend some of the built-ins in ways which changed the behavior of expected language features).
Neither of these things are new. The idea of using them to launch an attack, by altering the behavior of existing objects so that trusted JavaScript behaves differently than expected, may possibly be new but I wouldn't be surprised if the idea's been had before. In either case, it requires an existing, fully-exploitable cross-site scripting vulnerability to exist before this technique can work (otherwise, the code which modifies existing object prototypes will not be loaded or executed), so the author has essentially said that "if your site has a cross-site scripting hole in it, I can exploit it with cross-site scripting". Which is news to no-one; in fact, it's a tautology.
What kind of programmer can't use XML effectively anyhow...oh wait... (No, I didn't read TFA!)
Helpful hint for understanding the above: Tim Bray, author of TFA, is one of the guys who originally developed and spec'd out XML. Really. His name's on the spec and everything. So if he says that a particular XML tool has problems, it's probably a good idea to take him at his word;)
If you can use javascript to help with some more complex positioning (especialy relative resizing and such), XHTML 1.1 really isn't bad at all.
Um. Yes. Yes, it is. XHTML 1.1 is an utterly useless format, but not for reasons having anything to do with CSS; per the W3C's notes on media types for XHTML, XHTML 1.1 should be served with the MIME-type application/xhtml+xml, and never with the MIME-type text/html. But Internet Explorer, even IE7, does not understand this MIME-type (though, to be fair, they've only had seven years to get this right; I figure by the time we have flying cars and robot maids, IE will handle the XHTML MIME-type just fine) and will display its generic "I don't know what to do with this file, do you want to download it?" dialog.
XHTML 1.0 does have provisions for being served as text/html, but there are deep issues with that which most people who use XHTML are blissfully unaware of (hint: all modern web browsers treat XHTML-as-text/html as an unrecognized language, and kick into "tag soup" mode to parse it); if they ever switched to the XHTML MIME-type, or even to an XML MIME-type like application/xml (which works in IE, and is permitted for XHTML but not the recommended thing to use), they'd be in for some nasty surprises.
XHTML, at this point, is basically dead in the water; hordes of people switched to it because it was the latest and greatest, but did so with no understanding of how XML actually works or the constraints created by reformulating HTML in XML. It's only the fact that none of them are actually serving it as XHTML -- because everybody just goes ahead and uses text/html -- that's saved them from their ignorance thus far. Even the W3C seems to have reluctantly accepted this, with Tim Berners-Lee recently announcing that there will be a shift from the "forget HTML, XHTML is the only way forward" mentality to a revival of the HTML working group and a series of gradual refinements and improvements of HTML until (if ever) the world is really ready for XHTML. Which could be a while; a couple years ago, Evan Goer took a sampling of 119 sites which claimed to use XHTML, and tested for valid, well-formed XHTML served using content negotiation to send the proper MIME-type to browsers which understood it. Of the 119 sites -- cherry-picked to include a large concentration of professional web designers and developers, who really ought to know how to do this right -- only one was found to conform, and 74% failed the first step of checking the W3C validator. In the two years since, he's managed to find about a hundred sites on the entire Web which are correctly doing XHTML. 99 sites in two years isn't a rosy picture.
Well, that's what makes it interesting; non-notability is one of the most often-cited justifications for deleting an article, but it's never actually been an official policy to delete non-notable topics. The entire culture of exclusion at Wikipedia basically grew up around something that isn't a Wikipedia policy.
The point of an Encyclopedia is not be the repository of all knowledge, but to be a summary of all notable subjects.
And yet... notability as a criterion for inclusion is not and never has been an official policy of Wikipedia. It is, at most a disputed guideline, and the Wikimedia Foundation's own fundraising materials include the statement, "Imagine a world in which every person has free access
to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Not "the sum of all notable human knowledge" or "the sum of the human knowledge we think is worthwhile", but the sum of all human knowledge.
Whether New Line would do this depends entirely on their prediction of profit vs loss. If they think enough people will go and see a Hobbit film even without Jackson for them to get a good enough return on investment, they could well rush a film into production, and let their lawyers handle Zaentz's objections.
Nope. There are more players involved in this: MGM, not New Line, owns the distribution rights, which means New Line could make the film but not distribute it. And thus far, MGM doesn't seem too happy about the prospect of The Hobbit without Peter Jackson, so New Line would basically be cutting their own throats if they tried it.
A New Line Hobbit film is likely to be profitable so there's a good chance they might try that and hope that Jackson doesn't want to take the risk to compete with a later attempt.
Except, in a classic case of overly-complex intellectual property laws, New Line doesn't own distribution rights to The Hobbit. MGM does. Which means New Line could make the film, they just couldn't send it out to any theaters without MGM's permission. And MGM is saying that "the matter of Peter Jackson directing 'The Hobbit' films is far from closed."
Again, just because the Mozilla Corporation doesn't pay people to work on an old branch doesn't mean that Debian can't get patches checked into Mozilla.org CVS.
As I understand it, Mozilla Corp. is saying that, to comply with the trademark policy, the patches have to be reviewed and approved by Mozilla Corp. So no matter how many "open to third parties" branches there are, there would still be the problem of not being able to meet trademark compliance while backporting fixes.
Slashdot Mirror
Speculation, but speculation that's exceedingly likely to be correct. Look up the case of Glenarlow Wilson, a child in neighboring Georgia who will be registered as a child molester for the rest of his life, after serving a mandatory 10-year prison sentence -- because, at the age of 17, he had consensual oral sex with a 16-year-old girl. Georgia law at the time drew no distinction whatsoever about the age of the "molester"; any oral sex involving a minor, even if the partner was also a minor, was felony child molestation and left no room for judicial discretion in sentencing.
No, we know that he works for a company which develops a technology which does some of the things Java applets were supposedly going to do, back in the day. Not everyone who receives a paycheck is a shill who should be automatically discounted.
Um. No. Quoth his own bio page:
I'm not even a Java guy, and I know Bruce Eckel knows what he's talking about when it comes to Java. A shill he ain't.
Logic? Where is this logic of which you speak? Within the same article he argues that the iPhone won't sell because the iPod is better for media, and that the iPod won't sell because people will be buying iPhones instead. This is what passes for logic these days?
It's easier for the end user to have something that gives them most or all of what they need out of the box, rather than forcing them to scour around for the packages they need to get their job done. And once you have a solid reusable core OS like Ubuntu, building specialized distros tailored to specific types of users isn't all that hard.
I'm not entirely certain. Sarbanes-Oxley, according to people I've talked to who've had to deal with it, is a horrifically bad piece of legislation which was hastily written in the wake of major accounting scandals; even now, over four years after its passage, no-one is still quite certain what it requires, and lots of companies are erring on the side of extreme caution so as not to be made examples of by government regulators (probably especially Apple, which is already under investigation for irregularities in its stock options).
Others have pointed in in threads above that (in the US at least) any credit-card transaction less than about $5 can be a net loss of money for the seller, because of the processing fees charged by the credit-card companies. The $4.99 price may actually mean that they're just breaking even on this, while still being able to say that they charged money for the "new product".
And yet I know -- from looking at my bank statements, since I'm using a debit card for the iTunes store -- that I'm not being charged immediately. If I go a relatively long period (say, a week) only buying one song, I do see a 99-cent charge, but if I buy more than that I see a single aggregate charge instead. So I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing their best to hold off on the charge until it's profitable to run it through; I've seen a number of physical businesses (particularly coffeeshops) hanging up notices that they won't accept credit/debit cards on charges less then $5.00, so it'd make sense for Apple to do the same.
This also makes more sense than the line of reasoning which says it's $4.99 to make it look "real" -- there is, for example, a long and storied tradition in the US of employees signing over patents to employers for a fee of $1.00 (since there's a requirement that the transfer be in return for some "consideration").
Got an actual source for that? All the hysteria I've ever seen has been fueled by people who misinterpret the Gmail terms of service to mean "we never delete anything" instead of "this stuff's stored on distributed redundant clusters, so sometimes there's a lag between hitting delete and the message disappearing".
They'd be scanning the text and headers of every message anyway, and pretty much every email provider on the planet does the same (how else are you expecting spam filters to work? Magic pixies who predict when spam will come in?). So why not use similar heuristics to automatically choose a contextually-relevant ad?
I just have a user stylesheet which handles all that sort of thing; it scans for anything matching an IAB ad size, and sets display: none. And over the years I've added more specific rules for common image and object source locations, which gets the advantage of Adblock in a much more portable fashion (since on my MacBook I prefer SafarI); I've also added some more customized rules for specific situations and sites. Works like a charm no matter where I'm browsing.
Yes, in the same sense that your hard drive stores every file you ever create forever, even after explicit deletion.
Jobs himself seems to be clean with respect to the stock-options fiasco, so I have a hard time seeing how he could be "forced out". And it seems highly unlikely at this point that Apple's board (which is a lot friendlier toward Jobs than the board which ousted him way back when -- these days, Apple is controlled almost entirely by friends of Steve) would ever want to get rid of him in the absence of legal force requiring it. A better hypothetical to pose is what would happen if/when Jobs ever decides to retire.
I can think of a few possible explanations for the lack of Leopard in the keynote:
Remember that Apple's been making buckets of money, for years, by selling things that either were or were perceived to be more expensive than the competition.
This technique requires the prior existence of a full-exploitable XSS hole before it can work; otherwise the script which modifies object prototypes never loads and never executes. Again, the author of this paper is simply saying, "if your site has an XSS hole I can use an XSS exploit against it". This would be akin to a physical security expert pronouncing that he can get into your house if you leave your doors and windows unlocked, and is not earth-shattering or insightful in any way; the only reason it's getting press is the mistaken belief that use of object prototypes constitutes a never-before-seen technique, and that's debatable; even if no-one's ever actually tried a real-world exploit with this technique, any JavaScript programmer with his or her salt knows it's possible.
No, the author has not actually unearthed anything new; the mutability of object prototypes is a well-known and well-understood aspect of JavaScript. The potential to cause unexpected behavior by changing the prototypes of built-in objects is likewise well-known and well-understood (and has been a source of complaint against a number of JavaScript libraries -- Prototype, for example, used to extend some of the built-ins in ways which changed the behavior of expected language features).
Neither of these things are new. The idea of using them to launch an attack, by altering the behavior of existing objects so that trusted JavaScript behaves differently than expected, may possibly be new but I wouldn't be surprised if the idea's been had before. In either case, it requires an existing, fully-exploitable cross-site scripting vulnerability to exist before this technique can work (otherwise, the code which modifies existing object prototypes will not be loaded or executed), so the author has essentially said that "if your site has a cross-site scripting hole in it, I can exploit it with cross-site scripting". Which is news to no-one; in fact, it's a tautology.
Helpful hint for understanding the above: Tim Bray, author of TFA, is one of the guys who originally developed and spec'd out XML. Really. His name's on the spec and everything. So if he says that a particular XML tool has problems, it's probably a good idea to take him at his word ;)
So does HTML 4, only it gets the job done without any of the hassle...
Um. Yes. Yes, it is. XHTML 1.1 is an utterly useless format, but not for reasons having anything to do with CSS; per the W3C's notes on media types for XHTML, XHTML 1.1 should be served with the MIME-type application/xhtml+xml, and never with the MIME-type text/html. But Internet Explorer, even IE7, does not understand this MIME-type (though, to be fair, they've only had seven years to get this right; I figure by the time we have flying cars and robot maids, IE will handle the XHTML MIME-type just fine) and will display its generic "I don't know what to do with this file, do you want to download it?" dialog.
XHTML 1.0 does have provisions for being served as text/html, but there are deep issues with that which most people who use XHTML are blissfully unaware of (hint: all modern web browsers treat XHTML-as-text/html as an unrecognized language, and kick into "tag soup" mode to parse it); if they ever switched to the XHTML MIME-type, or even to an XML MIME-type like application/xml (which works in IE, and is permitted for XHTML but not the recommended thing to use), they'd be in for some nasty surprises.
XHTML, at this point, is basically dead in the water; hordes of people switched to it because it was the latest and greatest, but did so with no understanding of how XML actually works or the constraints created by reformulating HTML in XML. It's only the fact that none of them are actually serving it as XHTML -- because everybody just goes ahead and uses text/html -- that's saved them from their ignorance thus far. Even the W3C seems to have reluctantly accepted this, with Tim Berners-Lee recently announcing that there will be a shift from the "forget HTML, XHTML is the only way forward" mentality to a revival of the HTML working group and a series of gradual refinements and improvements of HTML until (if ever) the world is really ready for XHTML. Which could be a while; a couple years ago, Evan Goer took a sampling of 119 sites which claimed to use XHTML, and tested for valid, well-formed XHTML served using content negotiation to send the proper MIME-type to browsers which understood it. Of the 119 sites -- cherry-picked to include a large concentration of professional web designers and developers, who really ought to know how to do this right -- only one was found to conform, and 74% failed the first step of checking the W3C validator. In the two years since, he's managed to find about a hundred sites on the entire Web which are correctly doing XHTML. 99 sites in two years isn't a rosy picture.
Well, that's what makes it interesting; non-notability is one of the most often-cited justifications for deleting an article, but it's never actually been an official policy to delete non-notable topics. The entire culture of exclusion at Wikipedia basically grew up around something that isn't a Wikipedia policy.
And yet... notability as a criterion for inclusion is not and never has been an official policy of Wikipedia. It is, at most a disputed guideline, and the Wikimedia Foundation's own fundraising materials include the statement, "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Not "the sum of all notable human knowledge" or "the sum of the human knowledge we think is worthwhile", but the sum of all human knowledge.
Nope. There are more players involved in this: MGM, not New Line, owns the distribution rights, which means New Line could make the film but not distribute it. And thus far, MGM doesn't seem too happy about the prospect of The Hobbit without Peter Jackson, so New Line would basically be cutting their own throats if they tried it.
Except, in a classic case of overly-complex intellectual property laws, New Line doesn't own distribution rights to The Hobbit. MGM does. Which means New Line could make the film, they just couldn't send it out to any theaters without MGM's permission. And MGM is saying that "the matter of Peter Jackson directing 'The Hobbit' films is far from closed."
As I understand it, Mozilla Corp. is saying that, to comply with the trademark policy, the patches have to be reviewed and approved by Mozilla Corp. So no matter how many "open to third parties" branches there are, there would still be the problem of not being able to meet trademark compliance while backporting fixes.