Bull. Swing implements its own 100% Java widget toolkit with various custom "look and feel" hooks. It cares not-a-bit what GTK+ theme you are using. It doesn't even know what GTK+ is.
In JDK 6, yes, it does. If you use Swing GTK+ look and feel, you get your preferred GTK+ theming too. JDK 5 tried sort of emulate the default GTK+ 2 look and feel. You still get the damn ugly and useless GTK+ 1.x-esque file dialogs though. Perhaps in JDK 7 there's no practical difference between Swing and SWT =)
And no, it hasn't gone sour for me. (I really don't know what magic it does in the background; perhaps it only supports the standard GTK+ themes or something...)
Oh, and the ACLs in Windows are far, far more "fine-grained" than the usable-but-primitive permission bits in Linux.
Uh, Linux has supported POSIX Access Control Lists and Extended Attributes for quite a while now.
Heck, it dates from the days when ext2 was the king of filesystems, and that's a long way back. (Granted, at least on ext3, you have to specifically turn them on in mount options or with tune2fs, but on XFS, JFS and (to my knowledge) Reiser3 and 4, they're supported out of box.)
And when people say POSIX, they mean "real *nixes have had these features for, like, centuries". =)
What you're saying next? "Active Directory is so much more better authentication system than/etc/passwd, which is also a security risk that exposes encrypted passwords to users"? =)
Does it include the features for protecting a PDF from being altered/read without the right password or whatever it is (the ones that Russian guy was arrested for).
I suppose it contains description of the framework and description of how to identify and handle encrypted data. (as in "Here's some binary crap, it's stored with the method X with key Y. Just proceed as usual once you decrypt it.") I don't think it contains instructions for each and every DRM method, of course - after all, no one has so far come up with a DRM method that could be openly specified and not trivially crackable because everyone knows how to get the key...
What about the features that deal with applying black bars over text (can we build a PDF reader that completely ignores such data and see all the text that whoever did the obscuring thought was no longer readable?)
PDF supports "draw text here" and "draw black box here", and has never advertised anything but. If people use that for redaction, they deserve everything they get. Protecting people from the stupidity of the users has never been Adobe's job (or any standard body's job either), they trust that people have at least half a clue =)
Great points. Sorry I'm too coffeed to make good replies to other points today.
Games that use basic Win32 APIs are more likely to be E or E10+ (minesweeper, solitaire, etc.) than M.
Yeah, likely, but not necessarily. I've noted that games released for "limited" platforms don't tend to get high ratings... but that's only because in today's world, we're focusing on making the bloody games on the platforms that are capable of showing that stuff in all of the goriness. Game makers or the players don't get the kicks from a few red pixels nowadays. There's nothing in the platform that inherently limits making bloody games on simpler platforms; we've had violent games before.
For example, you don't see a lot of 16+ games on Game Boy Advance. Yet, there's the GBA version of Max Payne. Great game, tons of blood, a rating well justified. And, of course, my beloved Game Boy headphones are forevermore cursed now that they witnessed foul dialogue like "S#@$* you!" in its low-bitrate glory =)
Besides, Microsoft could toss in another heuristic ("executable named 3dmark.exe").
Nice loophole. You'd better not mention futzing with 3DMark executable to NVIDIA, or Quack... I mean, Quake III Arena to ATI. =)
Heuristics that depend on file names or contents a) get cracked and b) are nightmares to maintain. It's not entirely reasonable for Microsoft to demand you to send the name and MD5 of your executable just for the purpose of indentification.
Do they also use DirectSound and DirectInput?
I don't have any apps at hand right now, but Blender appears to use libsdl, and (AFAIK, which isn't much) its game engine part also supports SDL input devices. Supporting DirectSound and DirectInput is not farfetched in apps, especially for an app that needs those capabilities; I know there are some music programs that use DirectSound for sound output and effects too.
Basically, this heuristic would basically boil down to "if it uses anything besides the extremely basic Win32 APIs, and it's NOT on this list of excluded executables, it's probably too funny and has to be rated." (Meanwhile, the games that are developed using the aforementioned extremely basic Win32 APIs get away with no paranoia.)
This sort of heuristic would produce so many false positives that MS would dump it in the next patch and just say "set this bit in.exe header to 1 if you think this a) is a game and b) would be rated roughly 16+."
Or it could recognize the presence of "game engine" libraries, such as SDL, Allegro, ClanLib, and the DirectX import libraries, and use heuristics to mark some executables as "games".
Sounds extremely far-fetched to me.
Besides, just because it uses SDL or DirectX doesn't mean an application is automatically a game. 3DMark uses the very latest in game development technologies, yet it's not interactive. Or how about all apps that use OpenGL? Yes, used by quite a few games, but it's mostly used by just about all serious 3D modelling apps, last I checked...
Which is more likely if they ban Blender: a) "This is an open source application and therefore the very manifestation of evil," or b) "It's entirely, if remotely, possible that someone uses GameBlender to play one of those evil 'game' thingies and possibly circumvent the ESRB limits. It's an European program, for crying out loud."
(Speaking of which, I really hope Vista doesn't subjugate us to the ESRB system. We have PEGI and some countries also have their regional systems. Gee, I wouldn't want the headache to implement this thing in games themselves, let alone at the OS level =)
Of course! But Windows only comes with a screen door, and very few people realize they need a better door, let alone know how to install one. And even if they did manage to get a better door installed, they wouldn't be able to figure out how to operate the lock!
And to make matters worse, there's this finely dressed silent gentleman who's going in and out; the bored, obnoxious guard they posted on the door asks them "hey, this guy wants to come in, he says it's serious", and they just keep saying "sure, whatever", because it interrupts their dinner and they can't be bothered to check it out.
And when they realise what's going on, they just say "Burglars??? Look, I know what burglars look like, they've got scruffy clothes, a mask, a sack and a crowbar to pry windows open with. I didn't know burglars can dress well! Or come in the middle of the day. Or just ask nicely to get in. Nope."
One of the biggest security problems is to stop intruders who act casually and look like what they're doing is perfectly normal and routine. "This is a very important upgrade, click OK to install..."
Hah. I tried for the heck of it find my ol' training grounds. Unfortunately, I have no idea about the layout of the city (call it oldfashioned stubbornness of a (former) resident of a Small City not to learn the nearest Big City's geography =) so I ended up guessing a bit. Boom, I get an unhelpful map and a really grainy satellite pic. But never worry! I can always go to the Finnish Defence Forces homepage and get really damn precise directions on how to get there. They even hint "You need to look for 'Prikaatintie, Kajaani' if you use a navigator or a map service".
Well, maybe the ter-yo-rists aren't interested of some boring military installation in middle of nowhere. Besides, I'm guessing I'm not divulging a great military secret by saying they've got shitload of guns and people who can use them there. Maybe they want to hit the presidential palace or whatever. After all, they've got sharp aerial photographs of that in Google, not just blurry satellite pics! Aww crap, they've got directions on the website too. And something even far more vile: The information is translated to English so there's no language barrier for foreign terrorists! And the site has something jaw-droppingly dumb in there: ground level photos! Haven't they considered those will allow the potential terrorists to identify the building even more easily?! Now the terrorists won't need to kidnap and torture an Average Helsinki Resident to get a description of the building - even if, from the point of view of someone living here in the far north, it might sound like a productive hobby for them!
For starters someone should update his Wikipedia to reflect this "incident" (it's protected for new and unregistered users).
Regrettably, thanks to everyone's friend Jack "Policies? Cooperation? What are those? I just sue people" Thompson, Wikipedia policies are to put very little weight on some forum/blog postings or YouTube videos, at least when it comes to biographies and is negative in nature. This is potentially libellous which makes it even worse. (Which isn't a bad policy as such, of course. Makes reporting really breaking news difficult, but we probably focus more on reliability rather than freshness.)
But rest assured - if the mainstream media takes note, or if this develops into an actual lawsuit, it will be mentioned in the article.
It's being debated in the talk page though. If anyone finds anything that looks like a reliable source (actual journalistic source etc), that'll be most welcome.
It seems to me that what we're about to witness is the steady creep of corporate interest into the browser.
I've heard this "HTML" thing may make it possible that the corporate interests will creep into our web browsers.
Oh wait, it has allowed that for a while now. Heh, sorry.
These are just technologies. They allow people to handle data more intelligently. A web page may say "here's an ICBM coordinate" - it's up to the user to make the choice whether to fire up Google Earth, look it up from Yahoo, or reach for the plain old paper atlas. It may say "here's an RSS feed". If the user subscribes to "Boring Marketing Deals" feed, that's their problem - I'm using it to subscribe to primarily interesting feeds. If people figure out a way to profit from these things - well, who are we fooling, of course someone will find a way to profit from them.
And Mozilla Foundation may make money from Google deal - but the crucial bit is that they allow other search extensions to be installed. Open specification. I use other search engines besides Google all the time, and Firefox lets me.
I'm frankly not worried at this phase - the amount of good these things can do for average people far outweighs the amount of evil it can do.
LUA's can already be found in Windows XP, but nobody uses them because of the onerous restrictions they place on usability. In Vista, LUA's are mandatory and inescapable.
Let's seeeeeeee...
Let's go back in time to 1996, shall we? I was playing games happily on my Pentium 166. On Linux. Many games at that time used this thing called "SVGALIB". (For Windows-heads, here's a short explanation of that thing: "Unfettered access to SVGA registers and video RAM."). A bit later, this "hardware accelerated 3D" thing came. I needed to install this "Glide" thing if I wanted to play this completely elite "GLQuake" thing, which was just about the one and only state-of-the-art commercial game worth playing at the time. Both SVGALIB and Glide had this annoying restriction which is extremely relevant to this above comment: Basically, the binary needed to be made setuid root. (For Windows-heads, here's a short explanation of that thing: "Despite the user's priviledge levels, the binary runs at the superuser priviledges.") Security holes. Effed-up situations garbled the screen and at worst required reboot. You know the drill.
Now fast forward to 2007. X11 is has long since become the game graphics platform of choice. The majority of games use SDL, which is almost crashproof and I can't remember any crash in recent years that would have needed a reboot (at worst an X restart). The big point is, I get 3D acceleration and high game performance without need to mess with superuser accounts at all. The game binaries run as ordinary users. Yes, even the SDL version of glquake.
In my opinion, if Microsoft now mandates that games must run as limited user, that's mighty nice and swell. That's how it bloody well should be. Welcome to 2000s, Microsoft, hope you enjoy it as we have long enjoyed it in Linux-land. Welcome to the age of sanity.
In this day and age, it should not be necessary to wear an admin hat unless you're actually doing admin stuff. Imposing coding standards that make the games work like they should have worked anyway is just marvellous.
Kind of agree there. (Though open source folks tend to just use any of the n+5 ORM web frameworks out there to whip out web frontends to databases - slightly more work than with Access, but usually less troublesome in the end...)
b)A presentation program with all the bells and whistles(the current one lacks it)
How about a counterdemand: A boss/lecturer/etc that just tries to get a Point across rather than trying to impress the listeners? =)
I'm honestly ignorant of what kind of bells and whistles people need in presentations. Most of the effective presentations I've seen have had nothing but text and graphics, both of which OpenOffice.org do pretty well...
c)well thought out Desktop publishing
We have Scribus, which also reads OpenDocument (or at least I was under that impression lately, I haven't really needed DTP apps lately). It's fast turning into a really neat DTP program.
d)web page design tools
<voice type="html-nazi"> You have tons of text editors with HTML syntax highlighting, what more do you need? </voice> =) (Okay, I know, there's no practical solution here for people who want to do something while not knowing how to do it, but I'm just me with my generic hatred of WYSIWYG web tools...)
So what happened? This is what happened: There was a tiny little notice on Wikimedia fundraiser notice that Virgin United (+logo) will match the day's donations. People gave tons of money to Wikimedia. Virgin United paid tons of money to Wikimedia in turn.
Whatever happened to assuming good faith, not just in inter-editor relations but also in bigger scheme of things? The policy says "Assume other people aren't out there to get you and others, unless they actually are." That policy is also meant to be read "assume that The System isn't out there to get us all, unless they actually are."
Look at me. Here I am, naively assuming that Wikimedia Foundation is actually going to hold true to the principles that have already been agreed on, and that this was just an attempt - a successful one, seeing how the money meter jumped forward - to get some money. And a discreet one at that; it's not that they put a giant banner ad there. I sure as heck didn't see a notice on Administrator's Noticeboard that WMF or VU is going to dictate new policies. WMF does dictate policies, but they do take users in consideration; I'm trusting that they won't do a giant policy change without thinking it through and considering when and if it will piss off users.
What justification do I have for this naive assumption? Heck, I don't need a justification. I'm just trusting them. They haven't so far committed an incomprehensible crime against users. This particular move won't even register on any scale, has good intentions too, and if you evaluate it as an ad campaign, it's a profoundly ineffective one. Why the heck are people so worried?
The only thing this is going to change is that the "sponsors" of these fundraisers may be getting less "visibility" from now on...
(Warning: pseudo-intellectual random quotes) I'm assuming the WMF fears the Users, as it should be. The Users, I've seen, have so far had no need to fear WMF.
Just a wild guess - a complex number with floating points? (a+b*i where a and b are non-integer)
Well, that just means D has funny type names, and that the said type names hardly unique to D ("God is real, unless declared integer" is a bit older quote than D, I wager). And neither is syntactic sugar that allows people to make numbers unrecognisable a problem per se: a lot of languages allow such syntactic sugar, but fortunately the code reviewers and project style guides generally won't =)
Great, so blocking images in E-Mail will no longer get those image-spams thrown out, because now a bright-but-not-intelligent geek has given the spammer assholes a way to encode their crap in simple HTML which no spam filter will manage to get.
In other news, people are celebrating on the streets when HTML email is finally dead and all spam filters are configured universally throw HTML attachments away. Everyone is suprised when the 1990s technology is working so well and understand why every old beard has been complaining about HTML mail...
...or maybe it's just that someone writes a new rule for SpamAssassin (adds "no megacrappy HTML" rule after the "no crappy HTML" rule) and calls it a day.
robots.txt is a hack that works because only bots fetch the file. Regular users need not bother, and there's not that many indexing bots. It's also located in only one possible place (/robots.txt).
However, if you use content in a separate file, you have a problem. You want fine-grained control, so you can't demand it's in server root. What protocol says the file has to be there? You end up making bazillions of useless requests - kind of like MSIE and Firefox ask favicon.ico. (Just take a look at how MSIE implemented favicons first: Nothing in the page says it has a favicon, so MSIE does useless requests. Later versions say "yep, it can be here." The old extremely broken method is still supported by new versions...)
So you want to tag the actual HTML. And suddenly, you've reinvented PICS and the ICRA RDF.
The only thing that the social networks can change is that previously, you could be an idiot and no one noticed until it was too late. Now, it's easy and fun to make your idiocy known to the world.
I once got a job because someone saw me writing somewhat-smart-type comments on Usenet.
If I had a web design company, I'd hire people who can make their MySpace page have interesting content, look good and pass W3C validation... =)
I'd love to see this technology available for public use. The idea is brilliant. The fact that they restrict it to members of an association is not.
I'm a Wikipedia contributor. In Wikis, you have to be paranoid about the copyrights of the contributions. We have a not-that-glamorous, as of yet a little bit limited bot that does exactly what this tool appears to do - find suspected copyright violations.
I'm sure wiki editors, bloggers, and other open content creators would be terribly interested to see where their material gets copied and would be terribly interested to know if someone's misusing the content too.
But of course, no one's listening to the little guy. Even the Wikipedia bot has to use Yahoo API (hint hint, Google folks. =)
What happened was years of waiting and years of Microtek not returning my e-mails.
To develop this driver, SANE folks, apparently, had to apply some useful skills like a) usage of an actual screwdriver, b) squinting to figure out which chipsets were used, and c) squinting really really really hard at USB wire capture dumps. Note that at no point was Canon bothered at all. (Like I noted, getting specifications was hard because specs aren't their forté. The manual, IIRC, barely mentions that you need to plug in both USB and power wire, and if you get an all-white scan, you'd better turn the paper around and try scanning again.) Nor, I think, were the Plustek folks bothered much.
By the way, this scanner was actually handed to me due to pure dumb luck. I'd guess you can get SANE-supported scanners pretty cheap, at least if you keep your eyes open and not demand the very latest and greatest. Especially if you're willing to trade your several-years-old scanner with another several-years-old scanner. =)
(FWIW, my relatives have two scanners that actually don't work in Windows either. Nor really some good ways to plug them in reliably either. Funny how this "parallel port" thing gets annoying really fast and how finding "actual XP drivers" is funny too.)
I want to use Firefox 3 to upload a drawing that I scanned. So where do I get a Debian driver for my scanner, which is still listed as "unsupported" in the SANE HCL? This must be why you're kidding.
What happened to a little bit of optimism and belief for a brighter future? My scanner (CanoScan D660U) was completely and totally unsupported a while ago, and manufacturer is widely known for not knowing what this "specification" thing even is, but nowadays it works just fine in SANE. I suppose the SANE driver for your scanner will be there in due time.
(I run Debian's unstable version. No, I have no idea if Debian's current stable version has a fresh enough SANE library to support my scanner. =)
- W4, currently waiting patiently for HostAP support for rt2570 chipset, to get Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector working properly =)
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Why? To run those tiny scripts from your giant business app or a heavyweight desktop app once it's all started up...
JDK 6 even includes a new extensible scripting framework support just for this very purpose, and ships with the Rhino JavaScript engine...
In JDK 6, yes, it does. If you use Swing GTK+ look and feel, you get your preferred GTK+ theming too. JDK 5 tried sort of emulate the default GTK+ 2 look and feel. You still get the damn ugly and useless GTK+ 1.x-esque file dialogs though. Perhaps in JDK 7 there's no practical difference between Swing and SWT =)
And no, it hasn't gone sour for me. (I really don't know what magic it does in the background; perhaps it only supports the standard GTK+ themes or something...)
I'm not really a Sun fanboy at all, but I think diamond on the Win key and the text "Compose" on the menu key might be a good idea. I mean, Mac users have meta keys, why can't PC users get them too? =)
Uh, Linux has supported POSIX Access Control Lists and Extended Attributes for quite a while now.
Heck, it dates from the days when ext2 was the king of filesystems, and that's a long way back. (Granted, at least on ext3, you have to specifically turn them on in mount options or with tune2fs, but on XFS, JFS and (to my knowledge) Reiser3 and 4, they're supported out of box.)
And when people say POSIX, they mean "real *nixes have had these features for, like, centuries". =)
What you're saying next? "Active Directory is so much more better authentication system than /etc/passwd, which is also a security risk that exposes encrypted passwords to users"? =)
I suppose it contains description of the framework and description of how to identify and handle encrypted data. (as in "Here's some binary crap, it's stored with the method X with key Y. Just proceed as usual once you decrypt it.") I don't think it contains instructions for each and every DRM method, of course - after all, no one has so far come up with a DRM method that could be openly specified and not trivially crackable because everyone knows how to get the key...
PDF supports "draw text here" and "draw black box here", and has never advertised anything but. If people use that for redaction, they deserve everything they get. Protecting people from the stupidity of the users has never been Adobe's job (or any standard body's job either), they trust that people have at least half a clue =)
Great points. Sorry I'm too coffeed to make good replies to other points today.
Yeah, likely, but not necessarily. I've noted that games released for "limited" platforms don't tend to get high ratings... but that's only because in today's world, we're focusing on making the bloody games on the platforms that are capable of showing that stuff in all of the goriness. Game makers or the players don't get the kicks from a few red pixels nowadays. There's nothing in the platform that inherently limits making bloody games on simpler platforms; we've had violent games before.
For example, you don't see a lot of 16+ games on Game Boy Advance. Yet, there's the GBA version of Max Payne. Great game, tons of blood, a rating well justified. And, of course, my beloved Game Boy headphones are forevermore cursed now that they witnessed foul dialogue like "S#@$* you!" in its low-bitrate glory =)
Nice loophole. You'd better not mention futzing with 3DMark executable to NVIDIA, or Quack... I mean, Quake III Arena to ATI. =)
Heuristics that depend on file names or contents a) get cracked and b) are nightmares to maintain. It's not entirely reasonable for Microsoft to demand you to send the name and MD5 of your executable just for the purpose of indentification.
I don't have any apps at hand right now, but Blender appears to use libsdl, and (AFAIK, which isn't much) its game engine part also supports SDL input devices. Supporting DirectSound and DirectInput is not farfetched in apps, especially for an app that needs those capabilities; I know there are some music programs that use DirectSound for sound output and effects too.
Basically, this heuristic would basically boil down to "if it uses anything besides the extremely basic Win32 APIs, and it's NOT on this list of excluded executables, it's probably too funny and has to be rated." (Meanwhile, the games that are developed using the aforementioned extremely basic Win32 APIs get away with no paranoia.)
This sort of heuristic would produce so many false positives that MS would dump it in the next patch and just say "set this bit in .exe header to 1 if you think this a) is a game and b) would be rated roughly 16+."
Sounds extremely far-fetched to me.
Besides, just because it uses SDL or DirectX doesn't mean an application is automatically a game. 3DMark uses the very latest in game development technologies, yet it's not interactive. Or how about all apps that use OpenGL? Yes, used by quite a few games, but it's mostly used by just about all serious 3D modelling apps, last I checked...
Which is more likely if they ban Blender: a) "This is an open source application and therefore the very manifestation of evil," or b) "It's entirely, if remotely, possible that someone uses GameBlender to play one of those evil 'game' thingies and possibly circumvent the ESRB limits. It's an European program, for crying out loud."
(Speaking of which, I really hope Vista doesn't subjugate us to the ESRB system. We have PEGI and some countries also have their regional systems. Gee, I wouldn't want the headache to implement this thing in games themselves, let alone at the OS level =)
But currently...
The table below contains the latest Flash Player version information. ... 9,0,28,0 ... 9,0,28,0 ... 9,0,31,0
Windows
Macintosh - OS X
Linux
... we can just enjoy our status as the most up to date Flash Player platform. =)
And to make matters worse, there's this finely dressed silent gentleman who's going in and out; the bored, obnoxious guard they posted on the door asks them "hey, this guy wants to come in, he says it's serious", and they just keep saying "sure, whatever", because it interrupts their dinner and they can't be bothered to check it out.
And when they realise what's going on, they just say "Burglars??? Look, I know what burglars look like, they've got scruffy clothes, a mask, a sack and a crowbar to pry windows open with. I didn't know burglars can dress well! Or come in the middle of the day. Or just ask nicely to get in. Nope."
One of the biggest security problems is to stop intruders who act casually and look like what they're doing is perfectly normal and routine. "This is a very important upgrade, click OK to install..."
Hah. I tried for the heck of it find my ol' training grounds. Unfortunately, I have no idea about the layout of the city (call it oldfashioned stubbornness of a (former) resident of a Small City not to learn the nearest Big City's geography =) so I ended up guessing a bit. Boom, I get an unhelpful map and a really grainy satellite pic. But never worry! I can always go to the Finnish Defence Forces homepage and get really damn precise directions on how to get there. They even hint "You need to look for 'Prikaatintie, Kajaani' if you use a navigator or a map service".
Well, maybe the ter-yo-rists aren't interested of some boring military installation in middle of nowhere. Besides, I'm guessing I'm not divulging a great military secret by saying they've got shitload of guns and people who can use them there. Maybe they want to hit the presidential palace or whatever. After all, they've got sharp aerial photographs of that in Google, not just blurry satellite pics! Aww crap, they've got directions on the website too. And something even far more vile: The information is translated to English so there's no language barrier for foreign terrorists! And the site has something jaw-droppingly dumb in there: ground level photos! Haven't they considered those will allow the potential terrorists to identify the building even more easily?! Now the terrorists won't need to kidnap and torture an Average Helsinki Resident to get a description of the building - even if, from the point of view of someone living here in the far north, it might sound like a productive hobby for them!
Regrettably, thanks to everyone's friend Jack "Policies? Cooperation? What are those? I just sue people" Thompson, Wikipedia policies are to put very little weight on some forum/blog postings or YouTube videos, at least when it comes to biographies and is negative in nature. This is potentially libellous which makes it even worse. (Which isn't a bad policy as such, of course. Makes reporting really breaking news difficult, but we probably focus more on reliability rather than freshness.)
But rest assured - if the mainstream media takes note, or if this develops into an actual lawsuit, it will be mentioned in the article.
It's being debated in the talk page though. If anyone finds anything that looks like a reliable source (actual journalistic source etc), that'll be most welcome.
I've heard this "HTML" thing may make it possible that the corporate interests will creep into our web browsers.
Oh wait, it has allowed that for a while now. Heh, sorry.
These are just technologies. They allow people to handle data more intelligently. A web page may say "here's an ICBM coordinate" - it's up to the user to make the choice whether to fire up Google Earth, look it up from Yahoo, or reach for the plain old paper atlas. It may say "here's an RSS feed". If the user subscribes to "Boring Marketing Deals" feed, that's their problem - I'm using it to subscribe to primarily interesting feeds. If people figure out a way to profit from these things - well, who are we fooling, of course someone will find a way to profit from them.
And Mozilla Foundation may make money from Google deal - but the crucial bit is that they allow other search extensions to be installed. Open specification. I use other search engines besides Google all the time, and Firefox lets me.
I'm frankly not worried at this phase - the amount of good these things can do for average people far outweighs the amount of evil it can do.
Let's seeeeeeee...
Let's go back in time to 1996, shall we? I was playing games happily on my Pentium 166. On Linux. Many games at that time used this thing called "SVGALIB". (For Windows-heads, here's a short explanation of that thing: "Unfettered access to SVGA registers and video RAM."). A bit later, this "hardware accelerated 3D" thing came. I needed to install this "Glide" thing if I wanted to play this completely elite "GLQuake" thing, which was just about the one and only state-of-the-art commercial game worth playing at the time. Both SVGALIB and Glide had this annoying restriction which is extremely relevant to this above comment: Basically, the binary needed to be made setuid root. (For Windows-heads, here's a short explanation of that thing: "Despite the user's priviledge levels, the binary runs at the superuser priviledges.") Security holes. Effed-up situations garbled the screen and at worst required reboot. You know the drill.
Now fast forward to 2007. X11 is has long since become the game graphics platform of choice. The majority of games use SDL, which is almost crashproof and I can't remember any crash in recent years that would have needed a reboot (at worst an X restart). The big point is, I get 3D acceleration and high game performance without need to mess with superuser accounts at all. The game binaries run as ordinary users. Yes, even the SDL version of glquake.
In my opinion, if Microsoft now mandates that games must run as limited user, that's mighty nice and swell. That's how it bloody well should be. Welcome to 2000s, Microsoft, hope you enjoy it as we have long enjoyed it in Linux-land. Welcome to the age of sanity.
In this day and age, it should not be necessary to wear an admin hat unless you're actually doing admin stuff. Imposing coding standards that make the games work like they should have worked anyway is just marvellous.
Kind of agree there. (Though open source folks tend to just use any of the n+5 ORM web frameworks out there to whip out web frontends to databases - slightly more work than with Access, but usually less troublesome in the end...)
How about a counterdemand: A boss/lecturer/etc that just tries to get a Point across rather than trying to impress the listeners? =)
I'm honestly ignorant of what kind of bells and whistles people need in presentations. Most of the effective presentations I've seen have had nothing but text and graphics, both of which OpenOffice.org do pretty well...
We have Scribus, which also reads OpenDocument (or at least I was under that impression lately, I haven't really needed DTP apps lately). It's fast turning into a really neat DTP program.
<voice type="html-nazi"> You have tons of text editors with HTML syntax highlighting, what more do you need? </voice> =) (Okay, I know, there's no practical solution here for people who want to do something while not knowing how to do it, but I'm just me with my generic hatred of WYSIWYG web tools...)
So what happened? This is what happened: There was a tiny little notice on Wikimedia fundraiser notice that Virgin United (+logo) will match the day's donations. People gave tons of money to Wikimedia. Virgin United paid tons of money to Wikimedia in turn.
Whatever happened to assuming good faith, not just in inter-editor relations but also in bigger scheme of things? The policy says "Assume other people aren't out there to get you and others, unless they actually are." That policy is also meant to be read "assume that The System isn't out there to get us all, unless they actually are."
Look at me. Here I am, naively assuming that Wikimedia Foundation is actually going to hold true to the principles that have already been agreed on, and that this was just an attempt - a successful one, seeing how the money meter jumped forward - to get some money. And a discreet one at that; it's not that they put a giant banner ad there. I sure as heck didn't see a notice on Administrator's Noticeboard that WMF or VU is going to dictate new policies. WMF does dictate policies, but they do take users in consideration; I'm trusting that they won't do a giant policy change without thinking it through and considering when and if it will piss off users.
What justification do I have for this naive assumption? Heck, I don't need a justification. I'm just trusting them. They haven't so far committed an incomprehensible crime against users. This particular move won't even register on any scale, has good intentions too, and if you evaluate it as an ad campaign, it's a profoundly ineffective one. Why the heck are people so worried?
The only thing this is going to change is that the "sponsors" of these fundraisers may be getting less "visibility" from now on...
(Warning: pseudo-intellectual random quotes) I'm assuming the WMF fears the Users, as it should be. The Users, I've seen, have so far had no need to fear WMF.
Just a wild guess - a complex number with floating points? (a+b*i where a and b are non-integer)
Well, that just means D has funny type names, and that the said type names hardly unique to D ("God is real, unless declared integer" is a bit older quote than D, I wager). And neither is syntactic sugar that allows people to make numbers unrecognisable a problem per se: a lot of languages allow such syntactic sugar, but fortunately the code reviewers and project style guides generally won't =)
In other news, people are celebrating on the streets when HTML email is finally dead and all spam filters are configured universally throw HTML attachments away. Everyone is suprised when the 1990s technology is working so well and understand why every old beard has been complaining about HTML mail...
...or maybe it's just that someone writes a new rule for SpamAssassin (adds "no megacrappy HTML" rule after the "no crappy HTML" rule) and calls it a day.
Oh come on now, everyone knows the d4s are deadlier than the mediaeval caltrops, and twice as painful... =)
robots.txt is a hack that works because only bots fetch the file. Regular users need not bother, and there's not that many indexing bots. It's also located in only one possible place (/robots.txt).
However, if you use content in a separate file, you have a problem. You want fine-grained control, so you can't demand it's in server root. What protocol says the file has to be there? You end up making bazillions of useless requests - kind of like MSIE and Firefox ask favicon.ico. (Just take a look at how MSIE implemented favicons first: Nothing in the page says it has a favicon, so MSIE does useless requests. Later versions say "yep, it can be here." The old extremely broken method is still supported by new versions...)
So you want to tag the actual HTML. And suddenly, you've reinvented PICS and the ICRA RDF.
The only thing that the social networks can change is that previously, you could be an idiot and no one noticed until it was too late. Now, it's easy and fun to make your idiocy known to the world.
I once got a job because someone saw me writing somewhat-smart-type comments on Usenet.
If I had a web design company, I'd hire people who can make their MySpace page have interesting content, look good and pass W3C validation... =)
I'd love to see this technology available for public use. The idea is brilliant. The fact that they restrict it to members of an association is not.
I'm a Wikipedia contributor. In Wikis, you have to be paranoid about the copyrights of the contributions. We have a not-that-glamorous, as of yet a little bit limited bot that does exactly what this tool appears to do - find suspected copyright violations.
I'm sure wiki editors, bloggers, and other open content creators would be terribly interested to see where their material gets copied and would be terribly interested to know if someone's misusing the content too.
But of course, no one's listening to the little guy. Even the Wikipedia bot has to use Yahoo API (hint hint, Google folks. =)
For me, it says:
I suppose they got scared of my creature freakshow User-Agent header. =)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061024 Icewolf (Firefox/2.0 rebrand) Iceweasel/2.0 (Debian-2.0+dfsg-1)
To develop this driver, SANE folks, apparently, had to apply some useful skills like a) usage of an actual screwdriver, b) squinting to figure out which chipsets were used, and c) squinting really really really hard at USB wire capture dumps. Note that at no point was Canon bothered at all. (Like I noted, getting specifications was hard because specs aren't their forté. The manual, IIRC, barely mentions that you need to plug in both USB and power wire, and if you get an all-white scan, you'd better turn the paper around and try scanning again.) Nor, I think, were the Plustek folks bothered much.
By the way, this scanner was actually handed to me due to pure dumb luck. I'd guess you can get SANE-supported scanners pretty cheap, at least if you keep your eyes open and not demand the very latest and greatest. Especially if you're willing to trade your several-years-old scanner with another several-years-old scanner. =)
(FWIW, my relatives have two scanners that actually don't work in Windows either. Nor really some good ways to plug them in reliably either. Funny how this "parallel port" thing gets annoying really fast and how finding "actual XP drivers" is funny too.)
What happened to a little bit of optimism and belief for a brighter future? My scanner (CanoScan D660U) was completely and totally unsupported a while ago, and manufacturer is widely known for not knowing what this "specification" thing even is, but nowadays it works just fine in SANE. I suppose the SANE driver for your scanner will be there in due time.
(I run Debian's unstable version. No, I have no idea if Debian's current stable version has a fresh enough SANE library to support my scanner. =)
- W4, currently waiting patiently for HostAP support for rt2570 chipset, to get Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector working properly =)