Granted, long-term, the collapse of some of these megacorps could be beneficial for the industry they control as well as the economy as a whole - but only through the result of some pretty severe short-term chaos.
So instead we bolster the short-term, at the cost of long-term chaos?
This sort of justification is, I fear, both shortsighted (by definition) and very prevalent. In the long long term I have confidence that things will be OK. Unfortunately, by "long long" I mean centuries. In the merely long term, we are going to have very big problems unless we buckle down for the risk of a little bit of short-term chaos.
In other words, two particles moving toward each other will collide with more energy than what they started with, on a local level.
The problem with what you just said is that the only thing local about the thought experiment is the collision. If they collide, and are approaching each other, they started separated. In that case, you have to argue that they are "close enough" that you can treat them in the same local Lorentz frame. Note that "close enough" for purposes of GR around the sun is "within a light year". However, we're talking about small changes in c over more than half the age of the universe, and the universe has expanded enough in that time that you won't get a single local Lorentz frame to encompass both particles when they start heading towards each other.
Most of the "paradoxes" of special relativity have to do with switching between reference frames and coming up with a result which is counter to intuition. (Our intuition naturally expects everything to fit together in the same Galilean reference frame, since that approximation is what works best in most everyday situations.)
IANAP, so I may be completely wrong, and if so, please explain why, but, doesn't the photon get stretched out so that the rate of energy (e/s) recieved is less. Therefore the energy isn't lost and the photon actually has the same total energy, but the energy within a given length of the photon is less.
No, the total energy of a photon is hc/lambda, where h is Plank's constant and c is the speed of light (both generally assumed to be constant, though of course bringing that into question is what this whole thread is about). Lambda is the "wavelength" of the photon. The photon isn't really longer; it's a quantum particle whose position, detail of position, momentum, and so forth are governed by scary quantum things like the Heisenberg undertainty principle.
So if the speed of light is slowing down, could we convert matter to energy, wait millions of years for the speed of light to change, and then convert it back - violating the conservation of energy laws?
Good question, but I would think probably not. E=mc^2 doesn't really tell you about some remarkable physical process that lets you convert between two differen things "mass" and "energy". Mass is just another form of energy, and that equation tells you how much energy you have in (say) one kilogram of mass.
I'd have to think harder whether or not there is a problem with conservation of energy here. Here's the challenge: come up with a thought experiment that lets you get "something for nothing" from a changing speed of light. Just counting the energy in the universe isn't good enough (see below); what you need is some way of increasing (say) the stored energy in a localized object or particle *without* introducing any energy or work from outside. I can't think of a way to do it, but maybe somebody else might. (I haven't really posed my thought experiment well; can somebody suggest a better way to pose it?)
The reason that just talking about the total energy in the universe isn't good enough is that in fact General Relativity already does *not* have a global law of conservation of energy! There is a *local* conservation of energy, which is expressed in terms of derivatives of the stress-energy tensor. However, the fact that there is no single global inertial reference frame for the whole universe makes it difficult to say what is the "energy of the universe".
You can come up with things that look like they violate conservation of energy with plain vanilla GR and cosmology right now. For instance, the cosmological redshift. Start with a universe that has one photon in it. The universe expands, and the photon redshifts. Now the photon has less energy. What happened to conservation of energy? Similarly, if you have a cosmological constant (vacuum energy), and your universe gets bigger, you have more vacuum, thus more energy. What happened to the conservation of energy? With an infinite universe you can always say that you're pushing work out to further and further reaches of the universe, and since you never reach an "edge" you don't have to worry about somebody ever having to absorb all that work. (With a closed universe, I believe that formally some of the energy goes into the curvature.) But, really, conservation of energy is a local concept in a GR rather than a universe-wide concept.
The reason Astronomers don't want to accept this is becuase it would change the nature of every cosmological theory they have. They've invested large amounts of time in old theories, why should they learn new ones? It's all about ego for them.
While there is a possible grain of truth in what you say, it's probably vastly overstated.
It would be better to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. To almost everybody, the claim that the fine structure constant has been changing is pretty extraordinary, and as such requires pretty solid proof before any measurable fraction of people who care about these things will casually accept it.
There is a danger in the iconoclastic argument.
Yes, if a new truth is revolutionary and will require everybody to throw out everything they know, everybody will resist accepting that truth. It does not follow that therefore every revolutionary idea which meets widespread resistance must be a new truth.
If the very early Universe, when all the matter and energy could be contained in a microdot, was such an exotic place that the speed of light approached infinity -- then what happened to the speed of sound?
Two points. First, the idea that the whole mass of the "universe" was contained in a microdot just at the Big Bang isn't really right (depending on what you mean by "universe"). The whole mass of today's observable universe, yes. But if you take the cosmological models at face value, the universe is probably infinite in extent, and always was (at least as far back as you can go without worrying about unknown theories of quantum gravity). It's more accurate to say that the density of the universe approached an arbitrarily large value; then you don't have to worry about a "smaller infinity" or similar.
Now, to what you actually asked: the speed of sound is not a fundamental quantity the way the speed of light is. "Speed of light" generally means "speed of light in a vacuum", which according to standard theory is a fundamental contant. (In material other than vacuum, light tends to travel at speeds less than the "speed of light".) Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, but needs a medium to travel through. It's speed is entirely dependent on that medium. What we call the "Speed of sound" (when, say, timing distance to lightning strikes based on the delay before we hear the thunderclap) is the speed of sound in air at a typical density and pressure found on the surface of the Earth. The speed of sound in water is a lot higher. In rock, higher still.
In the very early universe, I would expect the speed of sound to be very, very high, but it will always be less than the speed of light in a vacuum (whatever that value happens to be at any given moment).
Does anybody know anybody who has contracts with Forgent? Does anybody have influence over that? If so, they need to be dropped.
The governments are slow to respond. This patent nonsense is ridiculous. What needs to start happening is "takedowns". A company like Forgent comes out of nowhere and demands royalty payments on something which has been in widespread use for a very long time on the assumption it was not so legally encumbered. This company never even contributed to the algorithm in the first place, so the argument that it's "fair recompence for fair work" is obviously bogus; it's nothing more than extortion which is legal under laws that are out of date. That company then needs to get spanked, and hard, and pubically. They need to suffer bigtime for their arrogance and their mistake. Everybody else needs to see them suffer, so that they will think twice before trying the same bullshit trick.
Anybody who is giving money to Forgent now needs to stop. Companies and individuals, or whoever Forgent currently makes money off, needs to boycott them, cancel their contracts. Forgent needs to go out of business, and it needs to be public and messy. We can't sit back and take it every time some piss-ant little technology-wannabe firm (a category in which I'd include Unisys nowadays) comes forward and starts claiming violation of "their" intellectual property. Somebody somehow has got to start putting these people in their place.
These parasites on society create nothing but grief; they do all sorts of damage to the community at large, getting rich themselves. It's no better than the behavior of the execs at Enron, it just happens to be legal. The system needs to be reformed; I wish our government would see their way through to doing that, but I don't have much hope. (Hell, our government is too busy going in the other direction with things like the DMCA, TIPS, and everything else that makes us so happy.).
Yeah... and for that matter, why ever go visit the Grand Canyon or Yosemite National Park when you can find photographs of them on the web? And why go to a concert when you can buy a CD or download a MP3 of the same music? Gee, with computer software and Google, we never need to leave our desks at all and view nature first hand!
(Sarcasm off.) Don't get me wrong. I'm very fond of programs like XEphem and KStars, not to mention sites like the Astronomy Picutre of the Day. But most amateur astronomers aren't in it for seeing the absolute best possible HST picture, or for viewing the constellations as abstract patterns however those patterns are presented. They... er, we are like birdwatchers in many ways. You can find all the pictures of birds you want in various bird books, but there's something different about seeing it first hand.
So while programs like Xephem and projects like the national virtual observatory are great, only those with a fundamental misunderstanding of amateur astronomers (such as the one described in the article here) would think it reasonable to suggest that they are a substitute for a good dark sky and seeing faint, fuzzy galaxies first hand.
Of course I'm using 'unstable' cause that's where the fairly recents stuff is.
Try "testing". I'm not a Debian user, but my understanding is that "testing" is actually fairly stable (I've heard that it's comparable in stability to Red Hat releases), and only a few weeks behind "unstable".
One year I will eventually get around to putting Debian on some system, and "testing" is what I'll use. I don't want to live on the unstable cutting edge, nor do I want to be more than a year behind. "Testing" seems to be the happiest median which is at least as up-to-date as (say) the latest Red Hat release.
Some have already drawn analogies to TV broadcasts, saying hey, it was broadcast, you get to keep a copy. You can't bitch now if people still have that copy, unless you're Jack Valenti.
You can spin this how you want. Here's one valid way to think about it though: a TV network brodcasts a show. You make a private copy on a VCR tape. Jack Valenti aside, you can watch that copy again as often as you like, and it's no big deal. However, you do emph not have the right to rebroadcast your copy of that show to the public without the permission of the original copyright holder. (I have my B5 tapes. I'm watching them through again now, showing them to my wife. I'm sure nobody is upset about this. But I'd be in deep doo-doo if I managed to broadcast them on a local access station, or uploaded them to a public website.)
If you are inclined to be negative about the Wayback Machine, you could view it this way. While the page existed on the original site, it was broadcast to the public. If somebody made a personal copy, they have it and will always have it, even if the site goes down. However, when the site goes down, individuals do not necessarily have the right to then "rebroadcast" (i.e. post) themselves the content they downloaded and kept. This, however, is what the WayBack machine is doing.
Mind you, except for the issue with www.dramex.org that I noted above (and which I fixed long ago), I like the WayBack machine, and am happy that they archived the content which was implicitly copyrighted to me. I would have opted in if I had wanted to. But, of course, I didn't know about it back in 1996 to opt in.
I don't have a good answer to the questions. Just thought.
I've also found stuff of mine that I've lost over time, amazed that anyone ever bothered to hold on to it.
Yes, I've used it for this too. I'm a volunteer webmaster for a site (www.fudgerpg.com) where we have a "monthly spotlight", but foolishly I wasn't keeping track of past spotlights. Eventually I wanted to put together a list of past spotlights, and realized that I hadn't kept that list. I felt stupid. The Wayback Machine (mostly) came to my rescue there.
When I first discovered it, it was a lot of fun. Much nostalgia; it was fun seeing earlier verisons of my webpages. Some go back quite a number of years.
On the other hand, I was horrified when I realized that there was full archiving of www.dramex.org. If you visit that site, you will see that there are a large number of scripts (as in plays), many of which have restrictions on use. Over the years, we've had people request that scripts be removed from the site; of course, we did so. However, they weren't necessarily removed from the archive, and an archive keeps them forever. Specifically with the wayback machine, I was able to submit stuff that removed the specific directories I was worried about (they don't archive the scripts from www.dramex.org, just the "front page" stuff which is all part of the fun), and keep them from doing it again.
I like the idea of archives; it preserves history. The web is a transient medium, but not entirely. Yes, much of the content is dynamic and should only be dynamic. Some of it, though, is like the front page of a newspaper. Each day, what's on "today's front page" is different-- but there is value and use in seeing what was on the front page in any day in history.
But sometimes you need to delete something and make sure it really is no longer available. When you don't completely control your site (i.e. somebody else archives it, rather than just mirrors it), that becomes impossible.
newspaper.
(Incremental backups can have a similar issue. If you only back up files which are "newer than the last backup", your backup doesn't have the information about files which have been *deleted* since the last backup. When you restore, you might find some files there you thought shouldn't exist any more.)
(Dramex.org has changed so that it's not straightforward to get directly to the scripts any more. META tags tell the search engines to leave the actual scripts alone, and you can only get the text itself via CGI. Yes, it's easy to subvert if you put your mind to it, but at least you do have to put your mind to it, and automated search engines or archivers won't. 90% of the security for 1% of the effort.)
That's the sacrifice we as web designers have to make. IE holds the lion's share of the browser market, and we can't expect MS to change the way it behaves in regards to web standards just to please you communist Moz users - it's an integrated part of their OS!!!
That's fine. I have my differences with this argument, but fine, whatever.
It is also, irrelevant. The original message is about an outfit promoting web standars. They are not promoting "code to IE". They are promoting standards. Given that, they should be coding to standards, not changing the way it behaves in regard to standards just to please you IE users.
We're not talking corporations or banks supporting customers here. We're talking a web standards advocacy group.
Your point is fine in theory, but you have to remember two things. Firstly, the vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their default font size (let alone how to do it). Secondly, the default font size on most browsers looks plain ugly.
Uh-huh. I'm not the slightest convinced. These are people who say "follow standards and everybody will be happy". Making tradeoffs to cater to the default font size on IE undercuts their message.
I laud what they're doing and approve of the content of the text.
On the other hand, they belie what they say with their front page. Oh, yeah, it may abide by all the standards. But, they don't abide by the spirit of the standards on their front page. The spirit of the standards is to keep the web accessible to everybody regardless of their choice of browser, so long as those browsers are also standards compliant.
It seems to me that a basic precept of web design should be that people choose their default font sizes because that's the size in which they bloody well want to read most of the "main" text on the web!! Resizing of fonts should be relative to that. Most of the text should be in the default size, and larger and smaller sizes should be reserved for headlines, "fine print", and other things.
These "web standards" people, however, seem to be using a font size a step down from standard for the main text on their page. Why? What possible excuse is there for doing that, while smiling and saying that they want to support browsers and web coding that is maximally accessible? It would be so bloody easy for them just to make their main text the standard font size that everybody chooses, instead of shrinking it down and requiring us to expand our fonts before reading the page!
That one fact makes it difficult for me to take this project completely seriously.
And yet, despite regular reports like this, posters on Slashdot keep asking why anybody who "cares about the web" would bother using a browser other than IE, and suggest that somebody who wants to use another browser (and, heavens, support cross-platfrom and cross-platfrom browsers) is a naive moralistic high-horse-rider who needs to wake up and get with the program.
With the program doesn't look like a very nice place to get to me....
"My" Web stuff is written to render in any browser, but there are lots of extra features that I've coded in to make navigation, etc. easier for IE users. NetScrape users can buy stuff, but IE users get some helpful DHTML tools to make it easier.
These tools are hidden to all other browsers & those just render the normal static content, because I don't have time to debug them on other browsers that represent 3% - 4% of my customers.
That's fine-- what you're doing I have no objection to. If there is "added functionality" for whatever subset of your users, that's no problem. (And, of course, it's best for you to add the functionality for either (1) the majority of your users, or (2) those for whom it is easiest to do so if there is a big difference.)
If the core functionality works in all standard browsers, and the extras you've done for IE don't get in the way of the core functionality working for standards compliant browsers, then great.
The "For Pay" stuff is written specifically to blow up when the end-user isn't using IE. The company doesn't even want users to TRY any other browser, it's a support nightmare. I'm not sure I'd have made that decision, but I understand the reasoning behind it.
Here, however, I sincerely hope that your employer goes messiliy out of business as soon as possible, and that you find a job somewhere else. Yes, this will get modded down as flamebait and troll and everything else, but hell, it's what I think. And, no, I don't believe it will happen, what with the real world being the sad awful place that it is, but it's what I really wish would happen.
I may be confused. I frequently use HTMLTidy and it says "no no", I ignore it. I just ran the w3 validator and it choked on every "input" tag in a table, said "check which elements are allowed here".
Hmm. I just checked mine again, and it validated as HTML 4.01 Transitional. This is a page where I do a stylistic, though legal, no-no, which is using tables for bulk formatting. (This is a nod to those few people who still use the ancient Netscape 4; NS4's CSS support isn't good enough to do a sidebar menu properly, so I do it the "wrong" way with a big table formatting the whole page.) In the "main" part of the page, there are lots of form elements, but the W3 validator didn't complain.
The non-standards compliant thing I do use on this page is the "wrap" attribute in "textarea" tags. That's a nod to inconsistent browser behavior; using the attribute makes the major browsers consistent, but it's not a part of the standard. Oh well.
He's right, you know. Banks and large corporations don't give a stuff. It's not viable.
I simply do not understand this argument.
Write standards compliant stuff, it works with IE. (OK, don't push the standards to the edge; use two-year old standards.) Nobody is losing here. The vast majority of your customer base has the functionality it wants. And those other 3% of your customers now also have the functionality they want. What's the problem here? What's the sacrifice? What's the tradeoff? Everybody wins. Your bank administrators paying for the web design are in better shape, because not only does it work for the 96% of their customers who use IE, it works for the 99% of their customers who use any of the relatively up-to-date web browsers. It's better for the bank. Why, why, why is there any rational argument for writing IE-speicific code, other than laziness and ignorance, given this?
What's the point of using another browser anyway with this being the case.
How about "IE is not available for the platform I choose"?
How about "I don't want to open my computer up to the Microsoft security flaw of the week"?
How about, "The web was designed for interoperable standards, and web designers who know what they're doing should design accordingly, thus making it unimportant exactly which browser you're using so long as it's a current one"?
How about "People who say that designers have to design IE-only sites are bloody clueless and lazy because real standards are out there which IE even works with, and there's no need to kiss Microsoft's butt on this one"?
c'mon man. I use Mozilla at home quite a lot and I design web sites (although I do more back end stuff than anything), but let's face the reality of the situation: If I'm designing web sites, I design for IE. Usually, my pages are fairly simple and work just fine in Moz, opera, etc, but I ain't waisting my time making scripts cross-browser compatible, etc, because those folks paying the bill don't care and the customer is always right.
You are part of the problem. You should be designing web pages to the standards, not to IE. Design to the standards, the site will work with IE. Your employer's happy, your customers (even those who don't use IE, or wouldn't if you weren't so ignorant in your web design choices) will be happy, and nobody even has to know that you aren't writing IE-specific stuff.
Given that there are web standards out there, and that IE implements them, I just don't undersatnd this attitude that you must design for IE. What's the problem with you people? Sheesh.
Microsoft needs to change its attitude towards Open Source for the same reason that the dinosaurs needed a near-earth asteroid search.
Unfortunately for them, they are as likely to understand Open Source as the dinosaurs were to understand the technology necessary for a near-earth asteroid search.
Unfortunately for us, the analogy is also likely to work in that it took the dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years to go extienct, and similarly Microsoft is likely to be around and dominating the planet for some time to come....
My math skills are far from what they used to be, but something divided by the same thing becomes one. Hence Gnu/Gnu = 1, so it should be 1 Hurd. And who cares about that 1 anyways? So it's should be Hurd.
But if there's only 1, it's hardly a Hurd. It's probably just one Bison. But GNU bison has been around forever, so why is any of this news?
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, long-term, the collapse of some of these megacorps could be beneficial for the industry they control as well as the economy as a whole - but only through the result of some pretty severe short-term chaos.
So instead we bolster the short-term, at the cost of long-term chaos?
This sort of justification is, I fear, both shortsighted (by definition) and very prevalent. In the long long term I have confidence that things will be OK. Unfortunately, by "long long" I mean centuries. In the merely long term, we are going to have very big problems unless we buckle down for the risk of a little bit of short-term chaos.
-Rob
In other words, two particles moving toward each other will collide with more energy than what they started with, on a local level.
The problem with what you just said is that the only thing local about the thought experiment is the collision. If they collide, and are approaching each other, they started separated. In that case, you have to argue that they are "close enough" that you can treat them in the same local Lorentz frame. Note that "close enough" for purposes of GR around the sun is "within a light year". However, we're talking about small changes in c over more than half the age of the universe, and the universe has expanded enough in that time that you won't get a single local Lorentz frame to encompass both particles when they start heading towards each other.
Most of the "paradoxes" of special relativity have to do with switching between reference frames and coming up with a result which is counter to intuition. (Our intuition naturally expects everything to fit together in the same Galilean reference frame, since that approximation is what works best in most everyday situations.)
-Rob
IANAP, so I may be completely wrong, and if so, please explain why, but, doesn't the photon get stretched out so that the rate of energy (e/s) recieved is less. Therefore the energy isn't lost and the photon actually has the same total energy, but the energy within a given length of the photon is less.
No, the total energy of a photon is hc/lambda, where h is Plank's constant and c is the speed of light (both generally assumed to be constant, though of course bringing that into question is what this whole thread is about). Lambda is the "wavelength" of the photon. The photon isn't really longer; it's a quantum particle whose position, detail of position, momentum, and so forth are governed by scary quantum things like the Heisenberg undertainty principle.
-Rob
So if the speed of light is slowing down, could we convert matter to energy, wait millions of years for the speed of light to change, and then convert it back - violating the conservation of energy laws?
Good question, but I would think probably not. E=mc^2 doesn't really tell you about some remarkable physical process that lets you convert between two differen things "mass" and "energy". Mass is just another form of energy, and that equation tells you how much energy you have in (say) one kilogram of mass.
I'd have to think harder whether or not there is a problem with conservation of energy here. Here's the challenge: come up with a thought experiment that lets you get "something for nothing" from a changing speed of light. Just counting the energy in the universe isn't good enough (see below); what you need is some way of increasing (say) the stored energy in a localized object or particle *without* introducing any energy or work from outside. I can't think of a way to do it, but maybe somebody else might. (I haven't really posed my thought experiment well; can somebody suggest a better way to pose it?)
The reason that just talking about the total energy in the universe isn't good enough is that in fact General Relativity already does *not* have a global law of conservation of energy! There is a *local* conservation of energy, which is expressed in terms of derivatives of the stress-energy tensor. However, the fact that there is no single global inertial reference frame for the whole universe makes it difficult to say what is the "energy of the universe".
You can come up with things that look like they violate conservation of energy with plain vanilla GR and cosmology right now. For instance, the cosmological redshift. Start with a universe that has one photon in it. The universe expands, and the photon redshifts. Now the photon has less energy. What happened to conservation of energy? Similarly, if you have a cosmological constant (vacuum energy), and your universe gets bigger, you have more vacuum, thus more energy. What happened to the conservation of energy? With an infinite universe you can always say that you're pushing work out to further and further reaches of the universe, and since you never reach an "edge" you don't have to worry about somebody ever having to absorb all that work. (With a closed universe, I believe that formally some of the energy goes into the curvature.) But, really, conservation of energy is a local concept in a GR rather than a universe-wide concept.
-Rob
The reason Astronomers don't want to accept this is becuase it would change the nature of every cosmological theory they have. They've invested large amounts of time in old theories, why should they learn new ones? It's all about ego for them.
While there is a possible grain of truth in what you say, it's probably vastly overstated.
It would be better to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. To almost everybody, the claim that the fine structure constant has been changing is pretty extraordinary, and as such requires pretty solid proof before any measurable fraction of people who care about these things will casually accept it.
There is a danger in the iconoclastic argument. Yes, if a new truth is revolutionary and will require everybody to throw out everything they know, everybody will resist accepting that truth. It does not follow that therefore every revolutionary idea which meets widespread resistance must be a new truth.
-Rob
If the very early Universe, when all the matter and energy could be contained in a microdot, was such an exotic place that the speed of light approached infinity -- then what happened to the speed of sound?
Two points. First, the idea that the whole mass of the "universe" was contained in a microdot just at the Big Bang isn't really right (depending on what you mean by "universe"). The whole mass of today's observable universe, yes. But if you take the cosmological models at face value, the universe is probably infinite in extent, and always was (at least as far back as you can go without worrying about unknown theories of quantum gravity). It's more accurate to say that the density of the universe approached an arbitrarily large value; then you don't have to worry about a "smaller infinity" or similar.
Now, to what you actually asked: the speed of sound is not a fundamental quantity the way the speed of light is. "Speed of light" generally means "speed of light in a vacuum", which according to standard theory is a fundamental contant. (In material other than vacuum, light tends to travel at speeds less than the "speed of light".) Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, but needs a medium to travel through. It's speed is entirely dependent on that medium. What we call the "Speed of sound" (when, say, timing distance to lightning strikes based on the delay before we hear the thunderclap) is the speed of sound in air at a typical density and pressure found on the surface of the Earth. The speed of sound in water is a lot higher. In rock, higher still.
In the very early universe, I would expect the speed of sound to be very, very high, but it will always be less than the speed of light in a vacuum (whatever that value happens to be at any given moment).
-Rob
Do they do anything besides extort for patents?
Does anybody know anybody who has contracts with Forgent? Does anybody have influence over that? If so, they need to be dropped.
The governments are slow to respond. This patent nonsense is ridiculous. What needs to start happening is "takedowns". A company like Forgent comes out of nowhere and demands royalty payments on something which has been in widespread use for a very long time on the assumption it was not so legally encumbered. This company never even contributed to the algorithm in the first place, so the argument that it's "fair recompence for fair work" is obviously bogus; it's nothing more than extortion which is legal under laws that are out of date. That company then needs to get spanked, and hard, and pubically. They need to suffer bigtime for their arrogance and their mistake. Everybody else needs to see them suffer, so that they will think twice before trying the same bullshit trick.
Anybody who is giving money to Forgent now needs to stop. Companies and individuals, or whoever Forgent currently makes money off, needs to boycott them, cancel their contracts. Forgent needs to go out of business, and it needs to be public and messy. We can't sit back and take it every time some piss-ant little technology-wannabe firm (a category in which I'd include Unisys nowadays) comes forward and starts claiming violation of "their" intellectual property. Somebody somehow has got to start putting these people in their place.
These parasites on society create nothing but grief; they do all sorts of damage to the community at large, getting rich themselves. It's no better than the behavior of the execs at Enron, it just happens to be legal. The system needs to be reformed; I wish our government would see their way through to doing that, but I don't have much hope. (Hell, our government is too busy going in the other direction with things like the DMCA, TIPS, and everything else that makes us so happy.).
Yeah... and for that matter, why ever go visit the Grand Canyon or Yosemite National Park when you can find photographs of them on the web? And why go to a concert when you can buy a CD or download a MP3 of the same music? Gee, with computer software and Google, we never need to leave our desks at all and view nature first hand!
(Sarcasm off.) Don't get me wrong. I'm very fond of programs like XEphem and KStars, not to mention sites like the Astronomy Picutre of the Day. But most amateur astronomers aren't in it for seeing the absolute best possible HST picture, or for viewing the constellations as abstract patterns however those patterns are presented. They... er, we are like birdwatchers in many ways. You can find all the pictures of birds you want in various bird books, but there's something different about seeing it first hand.
So while programs like Xephem and projects like the national virtual observatory are great, only those with a fundamental misunderstanding of amateur astronomers (such as the one described in the article here) would think it reasonable to suggest that they are a substitute for a good dark sky and seeing faint, fuzzy galaxies first hand.
-Rob
Two sites I refer to frequently for C++:
SGI's reference to the STL.
cpluslus.com, most notably the "standard libraries" reference link on the left there (for looking up bits and pieces of the iostreams library).
-Rob
Of course I'm using 'unstable' cause that's where the fairly recents stuff is.
Try "testing". I'm not a Debian user, but my understanding is that "testing" is actually fairly stable (I've heard that it's comparable in stability to Red Hat releases), and only a few weeks behind "unstable".
One year I will eventually get around to putting Debian on some system, and "testing" is what I'll use. I don't want to live on the unstable cutting edge, nor do I want to be more than a year behind. "Testing" seems to be the happiest median which is at least as up-to-date as (say) the latest Red Hat release.
-Rob
Some have already drawn analogies to TV broadcasts, saying hey, it was broadcast, you get to keep a copy. You can't bitch now if people still have that copy, unless you're Jack Valenti.
You can spin this how you want. Here's one valid way to think about it though: a TV network brodcasts a show. You make a private copy on a VCR tape. Jack Valenti aside, you can watch that copy again as often as you like, and it's no big deal. However, you do emph not have the right to rebroadcast your copy of that show to the public without the permission of the original copyright holder. (I have my B5 tapes. I'm watching them through again now, showing them to my wife. I'm sure nobody is upset about this. But I'd be in deep doo-doo if I managed to broadcast them on a local access station, or uploaded them to a public website.)
If you are inclined to be negative about the Wayback Machine, you could view it this way. While the page existed on the original site, it was broadcast to the public. If somebody made a personal copy, they have it and will always have it, even if the site goes down. However, when the site goes down, individuals do not necessarily have the right to then "rebroadcast" (i.e. post) themselves the content they downloaded and kept. This, however, is what the WayBack machine is doing.
Mind you, except for the issue with www.dramex.org that I noted above (and which I fixed long ago), I like the WayBack machine, and am happy that they archived the content which was implicitly copyrighted to me. I would have opted in if I had wanted to. But, of course, I didn't know about it back in 1996 to opt in.
I don't have a good answer to the questions. Just thought.
-Rob
I've also found stuff of mine that I've lost over time, amazed that anyone ever bothered to hold on to it.
Yes, I've used it for this too. I'm a volunteer webmaster for a site (www.fudgerpg.com) where we have a "monthly spotlight", but foolishly I wasn't keeping track of past spotlights. Eventually I wanted to put together a list of past spotlights, and realized that I hadn't kept that list. I felt stupid. The Wayback Machine (mostly) came to my rescue there.
-Rob
[ Reply to This | Parent ]When I first discovered it, it was a lot of fun. Much nostalgia; it was fun seeing earlier verisons of my webpages. Some go back quite a number of years.
On the other hand, I was horrified when I realized that there was full archiving of www.dramex.org. If you visit that site, you will see that there are a large number of scripts (as in plays), many of which have restrictions on use. Over the years, we've had people request that scripts be removed from the site; of course, we did so. However, they weren't necessarily removed from the archive, and an archive keeps them forever. Specifically with the wayback machine, I was able to submit stuff that removed the specific directories I was worried about (they don't archive the scripts from www.dramex.org, just the "front page" stuff which is all part of the fun), and keep them from doing it again.
I like the idea of archives; it preserves history. The web is a transient medium, but not entirely. Yes, much of the content is dynamic and should only be dynamic. Some of it, though, is like the front page of a newspaper. Each day, what's on "today's front page" is different-- but there is value and use in seeing what was on the front page in any day in history.
But sometimes you need to delete something and make sure it really is no longer available. When you don't completely control your site (i.e. somebody else archives it, rather than just mirrors it), that becomes impossible.
newspaper.(Incremental backups can have a similar issue. If you only back up files which are "newer than the last backup", your backup doesn't have the information about files which have been *deleted* since the last backup. When you restore, you might find some files there you thought shouldn't exist any more.)
(Dramex.org has changed so that it's not straightforward to get directly to the scripts any more. META tags tell the search engines to leave the actual scripts alone, and you can only get the text itself via CGI. Yes, it's easy to subvert if you put your mind to it, but at least you do have to put your mind to it, and automated search engines or archivers won't. 90% of the security for 1% of the effort.)
-Rob
That's the sacrifice we as web designers have to make. IE holds the lion's share of the browser market, and we can't expect MS to change the way it behaves in regards to web standards just to please you communist Moz users - it's an integrated part of their OS!!!
That's fine. I have my differences with this argument, but fine, whatever.
It is also, irrelevant. The original message is about an outfit promoting web standars. They are not promoting "code to IE". They are promoting standards. Given that, they should be coding to standards, not changing the way it behaves in regard to standards just to please you IE users.
We're not talking corporations or banks supporting customers here. We're talking a web standards advocacy group.
-Rob
Your point is fine in theory, but you have to remember two things. Firstly, the vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their default font size (let alone how to do it). Secondly, the default font size on most browsers looks plain ugly.
Uh-huh. I'm not the slightest convinced. These are people who say "follow standards and everybody will be happy". Making tradeoffs to cater to the default font size on IE undercuts their message.
-Rob
I laud what they're doing and approve of the content of the text.
On the other hand, they belie what they say with their front page. Oh, yeah, it may abide by all the standards. But, they don't abide by the spirit of the standards on their front page. The spirit of the standards is to keep the web accessible to everybody regardless of their choice of browser, so long as those browsers are also standards compliant.
It seems to me that a basic precept of web design should be that people choose their default font sizes because that's the size in which they bloody well want to read most of the "main" text on the web!! Resizing of fonts should be relative to that. Most of the text should be in the default size, and larger and smaller sizes should be reserved for headlines, "fine print", and other things.
These "web standards" people, however, seem to be using a font size a step down from standard for the main text on their page. Why? What possible excuse is there for doing that, while smiling and saying that they want to support browsers and web coding that is maximally accessible? It would be so bloody easy for them just to make their main text the standard font size that everybody chooses, instead of shrinking it down and requiring us to expand our fonts before reading the page!
That one fact makes it difficult for me to take this project completely seriously.
-Rob
And yet, despite regular reports like this, posters on Slashdot keep asking why anybody who "cares about the web" would bother using a browser other than IE, and suggest that somebody who wants to use another browser (and, heavens, support cross-platfrom and cross-platfrom browsers) is a naive moralistic high-horse-rider who needs to wake up and get with the program.
With the program doesn't look like a very nice place to get to me....
-Rob
"My" Web stuff is written to render in any browser, but there are lots of extra features that I've coded in to make navigation, etc. easier for IE users. NetScrape users can buy stuff, but IE users get some helpful DHTML tools to make it easier.
These tools are hidden to all other browsers & those just render the normal static content, because I don't have time to debug them on other browsers that represent 3% - 4% of my customers.
That's fine-- what you're doing I have no objection to. If there is "added functionality" for whatever subset of your users, that's no problem. (And, of course, it's best for you to add the functionality for either (1) the majority of your users, or (2) those for whom it is easiest to do so if there is a big difference.)
If the core functionality works in all standard browsers, and the extras you've done for IE don't get in the way of the core functionality working for standards compliant browsers, then great.
The "For Pay" stuff is written specifically to blow up when the end-user isn't using IE. The company doesn't even want users to TRY any other browser, it's a support nightmare. I'm not sure I'd have made that decision, but I understand the reasoning behind it.
Here, however, I sincerely hope that your employer goes messiliy out of business as soon as possible, and that you find a job somewhere else. Yes, this will get modded down as flamebait and troll and everything else, but hell, it's what I think. And, no, I don't believe it will happen, what with the real world being the sad awful place that it is, but it's what I really wish would happen.
-Rob
I may be confused. I frequently use HTMLTidy and it says "no no", I ignore it. I just ran the w3 validator and it choked on every "input" tag in a table, said "check which elements are allowed here".
Hmm. I just checked mine again, and it validated as HTML 4.01 Transitional. This is a page where I do a stylistic, though legal, no-no, which is using tables for bulk formatting. (This is a nod to those few people who still use the ancient Netscape 4; NS4's CSS support isn't good enough to do a sidebar menu properly, so I do it the "wrong" way with a big table formatting the whole page.) In the "main" part of the page, there are lots of form elements, but the W3 validator didn't complain.
The non-standards compliant thing I do use on this page is the "wrap" attribute in "textarea" tags. That's a nod to inconsistent browser behavior; using the attribute makes the major browsers consistent, but it's not a part of the standard. Oh well.
-Rob
W3 validators say I can't put form elements in tables!!!!
Funny, I've never had the W3 HTML validator (HTML 4.01) complain about this.
-Rob
He's right, you know. Banks and large corporations don't give a stuff. It's not viable.
I simply do not understand this argument.
Write standards compliant stuff, it works with IE. (OK, don't push the standards to the edge; use two-year old standards.) Nobody is losing here. The vast majority of your customer base has the functionality it wants. And those other 3% of your customers now also have the functionality they want. What's the problem here? What's the sacrifice? What's the tradeoff? Everybody wins. Your bank administrators paying for the web design are in better shape, because not only does it work for the 96% of their customers who use IE, it works for the 99% of their customers who use any of the relatively up-to-date web browsers. It's better for the bank. Why, why, why is there any rational argument for writing IE-speicific code, other than laziness and ignorance, given this?
-Rob
What's the point of using another browser anyway with this being the case.
How about "IE is not available for the platform I choose"?
How about "I don't want to open my computer up to the Microsoft security flaw of the week"?
How about, "The web was designed for interoperable standards, and web designers who know what they're doing should design accordingly, thus making it unimportant exactly which browser you're using so long as it's a current one"?
How about "People who say that designers have to design IE-only sites are bloody clueless and lazy because real standards are out there which IE even works with, and there's no need to kiss Microsoft's butt on this one"?
-Rob
c'mon man. I use Mozilla at home quite a lot and I design web sites (although I do more back end stuff than anything), but let's face the reality of the situation: If I'm designing web sites, I design for IE. Usually, my pages are fairly simple and work just fine in Moz, opera, etc, but I ain't waisting my time making scripts cross-browser compatible, etc, because those folks paying the bill don't care and the customer is always right.
You are part of the problem. You should be designing web pages to the standards, not to IE. Design to the standards, the site will work with IE. Your employer's happy, your customers (even those who don't use IE, or wouldn't if you weren't so ignorant in your web design choices) will be happy, and nobody even has to know that you aren't writing IE-specific stuff.
Given that there are web standards out there, and that IE implements them, I just don't undersatnd this attitude that you must design for IE. What's the problem with you people? Sheesh.
-Rob
Microsoft needs to change its attitude towards Open Source for the same reason that the dinosaurs needed a near-earth asteroid search.
Unfortunately for them, they are as likely to understand Open Source as the dinosaurs were to understand the technology necessary for a near-earth asteroid search.
Unfortunately for us, the analogy is also likely to work in that it took the dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years to go extienct, and similarly Microsoft is likely to be around and dominating the planet for some time to come....
-Rob
My math skills are far from what they used to be, but something divided by the same thing becomes one. Hence Gnu/Gnu = 1, so it should be 1 Hurd. And who cares about that 1 anyways? So it's should be Hurd.
But if there's only 1, it's hardly a Hurd. It's probably just one Bison. But GNU bison has been around forever, so why is any of this news?
-Rob