I have two tool docks open in GIMP: One has toolbox, another has layers/palettes/etc.
Having multiple documents open is never pain, because my toolbox is always on left, my other dock is always on right, and the windows are resized so that they overlap with the dock windows but leave a part of them at sight. Need the dock? It's right on sight, just click on it to raise it.
Multiple applications? Um, that's what virtual desktops are for. Need to use another application on the same desktop? I hit Alt+H to hide GIMP, along with all of its windows, to use them. Resume? Middle click on desktop, select any of GIMP's windows from the list, and there we go.
The lesson learned - GIMP isn't pain to use if you use a window manager that doesn't suck. Like Window Maker.
Hi, I'm just a GIMP fan; Krita has cool features, so I have some random questions on how Krita is progressing. (Obligatory disclaimer: Not intended as a troll or anything. I'm just clueless.)
1) Has the UI been fixed? The use of MDI made it difficult as hell to use - X11 has application window groups and virtual desktops for a reason, you know. Can the palettes etc. be docked in separate windows? In 1.5 the stuff can be undocked from the windows, but they're all separate, and their locations aren't particularly well remembered, which makes that feature pretty much useless (Eh, toolbox, 5 tool strips and 3 tool windows open, as opposed to my usual 3-window setup in GIMP, and those locations are remembered - plus they're all duplicated for each window, which is pretty odd)...
2) How's the tablet support? The pressure support in 1.5 appears to be pretty... strange, to say the least. Is there any equivalent of GIMP's ink tool? I couldn't find any from 1.5 based on a cursory examination, and the brush tool didn't work at all like I expected it to work (ticking on the brush transparency made transparency effect work pretty weakly, as happened with the size - I suppose this can be adjusted to have more dramatic effect, but I couldn't find it).
3) Is there anyone who's using both GIMP and Krita; how well does image interchange work between the two apps? I haven't investigated how well I could move.xcfs, for example, between the two apps. I know Krita can use some GIMP bits, like fill patterns and brushes and like; does the opposite work too?
can you imagine what it would take to make/. XHTML?
Er... that's a bit wrong.
The reason why it took so long for/. to switch away from extremely broken HTML 3.2 to a lot less broken HTML 4.01 Strict was that it's run by a little bit hackily designed application. It was designed to do a thing. It was not designed with maintainability of HTML in mind.
Slashcode is, I guess, a mass of Perl code that just happens to produce some HTML in a lot of places along the way.
It would have been a lot easier to transition to new version of HTML if Slashcode had been designed ground up with separation of concerns in mind. Back when Slashdot was started, there was this "Perl" thing. Nowadays, people who would start designing a huge news portal weblog engine app in Perl would probably start with Maypole or Catalyst or whatever. There's a big push for MVC-style frameworks right now. I'm developing Ruby on Rails app right now; fixing an app for a completely groundbreaking new version of HTML that breaks all conventions of an earlier version would be relatively straightforward (you just edit all of the stuff in/app/views, perhaps/app/helpers, and that's it, no need to touch your application code!)
As for remembering to close my tags, heck, I remembered to close all tags in this comment. It's not that much harder to type XHTML in a proper editor either - I just hit Ctrl-C,/, and my last tag closes. It's all a matter of getting used to it. =)
Yeah. Just that not every blogger is running an (apparently - I can't tell for sure because I'm not American) really popular blog, and appears to have some sort of important commitee job (again, apparently - I'm not American so I have no idea how relevant the job is, it sounds important...) so the entry has at least weak notability down. I don't see why Wikipedia couldn't cover notable bloggers.
I regularly delete bios of bloggers who don't have this sort of claims of fame. Be sure to tag them with {{db-bio}} if you run across completely nonnotable people. If their notability can't really be established, we're happy to delete them, or at least run them through the deletion process to see if they stick.
Does that also mean no Apple, Dell, HP, or Toshiba Laptops which use sony manufactured batteries?
"So how are the sales?"
"Well, PS3 sales are pretty much dead, no one buys our other widgets... um..."
"*sigh* Okay, do we have anything that still sells? Batteries?"
"Oh, those still sell, I suppose."
"Great. We used to dominate the console world. Now we sell batteries. Oh well..."
"Except that the laptop batteries are blowing up and no one wants them. But we still have good market hold on the rechargeable AA battery market!"
"Great! We're beaten, we're modest, but one day, one day, we shall get our vengeance!"
There are such methods; ICRA (nee RSACi) is one of them, then there's an older system called SafeSurf. Both are supported (last I checked) by MSIE and censorware packages. Not sure about Firefox or like.
I have only a few beefs with these systems:
Metadata on HTML sucks. PICS labels are antiquated and complex. ICRA tries something based on RDF but I haven't so far seen an open, completely free-to-use standard based on RDF. We probably need something modeled after Dublin Core / Creative Commons metadata.
ICRA keeps a database of the rated sites and the ToC says they can demand you to remove the ratings if they're incorrect (not sure how frequently they do that though). Since they don't even give detailed definition of some of the labels, I find this a little bit unreasonable. Fuzzy gut-feeling ratings are possibly adequate, but the big point of voluntary rating would be that no one would police them; since the site owner is tasked with the labeling in the first place, not the authority that designs the labeling system, you have to trust the labeler's honesty!
ICRA and SS ratings are probably a little bit too complex. Like you suggested, it would probably be simpler to just have "appropriate for children: yes/no" label. Or "age group: children/teens/adults". It can't be that difficult!
Audio must be Vorbis and video Theora, but there isn't any convenient way to play these. Sure there are ports of mplayer and other such tools, but the average OS X user isn't willing to use tools with non-standard UIs and flaky behavior.
There's Vorbis plugin for Quicktime, and it allows playing Vorbis files in iTunes. Works pretty well if you ask me.
As for video, there's VLC, and it has a native user interface. Looks and feels like QuickTime player, and is just as easy to use as any other Mac application. Except, you know, for the whole fact that you can actually hit Cmd+F and it goes fullscreen, instead of complaining that you have to buy the pro version. And it can do video transcoding fairly easily if you ask it nicely. And it can also play DVDs. Okay, it actually pretty much kills QuickTime Player in every respect. =)
Um, acid2 represents one faction's idea on what an ideal, future-proof CSS implementation should do. It's not be-all end-all test of absolute must-have features of CSS. Gecko doesn't fall too far from the goal, and rest assured they're working on the issues.
Those are my FF issues. What are yours?
I'm not using the beta yet. Um... I would terribly appreciate it if middle-click would do nothing. Currently, on Linux, middle-clicking goes into the URL that I have on selection buffer. Middle click gets clicked by accident awfully often when scrolling and I end up staring at http://www.whateverthecrapihadonclipboardwhenmymou seslipped.com/ (see below).
Um... seems like this can be fixed in about:config. middlemouse.contentLoadURL = false. I think. Didn't know this. Very cool.
Another beef is the automatic expansion of example => http://www.example.com/ which just gives me bunch of false alarms. If I find myself looking at http://www.whateverthecrapihadonclipboardwhenmymou seslipped.com/, I'm going to scream. While I'm at it, it shouldn't even assume I want http:/// there; it should demand full URLs. And above the heck all, if I want to use this as a search engine, I type "g (keywords)", not the plain address - I don't want a search bar, I don't want an intelligent search bar;I just want an ordinary address bar that also has this keyword support thing. Is it too much to ask?
I think this is at least the latter is somehow fixable through about:config, but I forgot the instructions (didn't try it at first because it appeared to have side effects). Setting keyword.url = about:blank, keyword.enabled = false has little effect...
The way I see it, copyright is "communist" in that it's supposed to primarily be a mechanism to control corporate greed, i.e., "you have a temporary limited control over your (or your company's) intellectual property, but note that it's only limited and only temporary - you cannot hold complete and utter control over your creation, and your exclusive rights will expire one day, liberating it for all to use."
Of course, the corporations don't exactly like this shiny outlook and are busy trying to erode whatever rights the consumer has and extending the terms toward perpetuity...
There were multiple variations of the same ad. "Punch the monkey" ad was the first. May have had the shooting ad too. Apparently hitting a moving target in a little box was too difficult for some users, so they switched to a wide-angle taser or something with "Shock the monkey". One click, one kill.
DjVu doesn't do vector art. It's great for scans, but if you have a typesetting program that produces the final file, PDF is the way to go. Keeps text as text, pictures as pictures, and vector art as vector art.
Also the apps that convert stuff to DjVu are a bit wonky on open source side. I seem to have best results on pure black and white scans. Colour documents just don't seem too hot. If I have a bunch of colour comics scans in JPEG format, it's easiest and most space-effective to just use ImageMagick and join them into a PDF. Converting to DjVu means bigger file and lower quality...
Actually, by "which is usually root" you mean "who also happens to know the root password too" or "is in/etc/sudoers". Just because people can use r00t powers on their own machine doesn't mean they want to do that all the time. I sure don't.
And this exploit doesn't requite local access, just access to the X11 sockets. Better make sure X11 isn't accepting any remote connections, and firewall TCP and UDP ports 6000-6007 just to be sure...
Yep. There's a slightly worrying trend in my opinion to use AfD for cleanup - AfDs are crowded as is. I'm personally in favour of imposing cleanup on articles and using AfD for what appear to be extremely hopeless cases. This particular article is in bit of a bind: It's clearly going against verifiability policy right now, which would mean it would need massive cleanups. It really would not need to be deleted if people would actually act when the community consensus is "this article warrants a topic of its own, but the lack of sourcing in the current article stinks". I've stated often verifiability is not a deletion reason. In this case, however, sweeping the whole article out of the door and starting over with strict requirement for good sourcing is a better option.
Perhaps a better way to tackle this would be if AfD could have a procedural rescheduling, as in concluding the deletion debate as "The article is in really bad shape now, but the community doesn't think it's entirely unsalvageable; Relist the article for deletion in April 2007" (6 months). This would need a specific tracking list. This would, in my opinion, keep AfD as an useful tool to whip articles in good shape; if the article has been found awful and near to warranting deletion once, finding it awful 6 months later despite of promises to contrary is bad.
Damn, I got to get myself a bigger PDA. Having 32MB isn't what it used to be!
Yeah, I thought having Wikipedia in Plucker format would be really cool, but I had to face the reality that crunching Wikipedia to my 2 megabyte Palm m100 is a bit difficult...
...hmm, well, I suppose I could crunch Wikipedia's Pokémon articles, or something, in this space - or some guides from StrategyWiki...
I'm an active gamer and I have no problems living in Linux all the time.
There's a bunch of really good open source games out there (Battle for Wesnoth and Scorched3D being my current favourites), and a handful of good commercial games (I've got a handful of id Software titles, and Neverwinter Nights). Most of my online gaming these days consists of BfW with my friends. Life on Linux is also really easy if you're a Quake fan. =)
I've also got a rather large bunch of DOS games. All work beautifully in DOSBox without the need for extra stuff. A veritable treasure trove of unbeatable classics, no? And there's also a bunch of software to specifically run old games. Wake me up when someone writes a better RPG than Ultima VII. =)
It also helps if you redefine the problem set a bit. You see, for everything else, I've got a PSone, GameCube and Nintendo DS. I can use these quite smoothly with Linux and get benefits of Modern Gaming and Second-Hand Markets. =)
Articles on real people, who have done notable things, are constantly disputed while (stealing SomethingAwful's thunder here) the article on Knuckles the Echidna is longer than the article on Kofi Annan.
Last time I checked, no one was telling either of those articles were up for deletion. Both article subjects are clearly up to the notability standards.
And you can't say that Knuckles article is "more notable" by Wikipedia standards than Annan. Notability is fail/pass thing. Knuckles passes. Annan passes.
You're confusing two things: The notability standards and editing priorities. These are entirely separate issues. Notability, being a binary thing, also doesn't have any bearing on the priorities.
Let me tell you about the priorities. Wikipedia happens to be built by ordinary humans. There's to-do lists (And the Wikipedia 1.0 Importance ratings), but people ignore them, pretty obviously, in case they're not interested at the moment or feel they're not qualified to edit the article. People are also not really universal experts. I don't know darn about international politics. I know geek stuff.
The reason why Knuckles article is longer than Annan article is that people think Knuckles is cool and popular, and Annan is just some bigwig at UN. You might as well ask "Why isn't the youth today interested of politics? Why do they just play videogames all day long?" You can trumpet all day that writing a really big article on Annan is really really important, but if you do it just ideologically, it won't work. "We must expand Annan article, just because it makes us look silly when Knuckles article is longer than Annan article" is not inspring. Try listing the problems, and addressing them yourself if you can. "Here, let me tell you what this article could have" is constructive.
Where do these people get off deciding what we will remember, and why is it all useless information?
Uselessness is highly subjective. As a computer/video gamer I don't think Knuckles article (or any pop culture article) is "useless". And I'm a Nintendo guy. =) But Annan article is important, I'm not doubting that.
There's a whole lot of information in Wikipedia I just plain don't care about, as I don't really care about it in "real life". I'm not doubting it is interesting to some people, however, and I'm not saying it should be removed just because I can't be bothered to read it.
Remember, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with specific goals. It doesn't intend to be a catch-all repository of facts. Think for a second: Would this be a good topic in an encyclopedia? Yes! Would Britannica take this article as it is? Heck no, no, no.
And the most important question of all: Is Wikipedia the end of all knowledge? Can't we do some stuff outside of Wikipedia too? Heck, Wikipedia seems to quote a lot of stuff from outside, don't they...
Instead of "My favourite topic doesn't fly with Wikipedia, their methodology apparently sucks, therefore Wikipedia sucks", you didn't think of doing the constructive thing: "My favourite topic doesn't fly with Wikipedia, as it conflicts with their goals and policies; How could we rebuild this article in a way that it doesn't conflict with their goals and policies, and generate an external source that could benefit not only Wikipedia, but Slashdot community as well?" It's entirely understandable to get mad if you get slapped. It's prudent to get up and think of what to do to repair the damage.
The reason the article is up for deletion is not "dubious" at all.
This article (and other Slashdot culture articles that were up on AfD lately) was basically formed like this: A bunch of Slashdotters visit Wikipedia, someone gets the bright idea "hey, it would be cool if we had an article on Slashdot trolling." They begin working on the article, adding random bits of troll-lore.
Which is all fine with regular Slashdotters. They know it's right. They won't challenge a single word. I mean, I wouldn't.
But then comes the problem: Someone who's a bit skeptical. Someone who's probably new to Slashdot and don't know a lot about what's going on here. They want to know if this stuff is really true. They can come to Slashdot and read (Score: -1, Troll) comments all day; They can conclude that the article may be basically right, but they can't find an authority that says so. They can't tell if all these people who have been editing the article are "authorities" or not. Other articles have sources that can easily be used to verify that stuff. Stuff written by experts and journalists. Good enough.
I can't remember if I edited this particular article, but I think I edited the "recurring jokes" article (how silly of me, considering I was in favour of deleting it): A curious user can check that "Hmm, User:Wwwwolf added something about Evil Bits;" (pokepokepoke) "Yep, this is WWWWolf (#2428) on Slashdot, he's probably been there long enough to remember the pain and blood and suffering of that fateful April Fools Day, 2003." But can they do the same research on all "experts"? Even the ones behind an IP addy? (As a side note, I really hope Citizendium folks have an answer to this problem!)
The article doesn't point to three-digit-UID user's peer-reviewed work that explores the trolling in a conclusive way.
That's what Wikipedia demands; It doesn't demand the users to be experts, it demands the users quote or paraphrase or summarise an expert's work, as "expert" is defined by society at large. If you're an expert of some field and editing Wikipedia, that does help, because you probably have a good idea on who taught you.
[I'm supposed to be an "expert" on computer science, and I can easily say: "I'll write something about some design pattern. Hmm, didn't Martin Fowler write something about this?"...or "Hmm, someone doesn't have a good source on this claim about shell sort. Hey, Knuth's TAoCP had something about this..."]
Don't get me wrong: The way this article was built was marvellous. I like it a lot. However, it's not a good way to build a good Wikipedia article according to Wikipedia's policies. It's a good demonstration on how wiki concept can accumulate information. It's a bad example of an article according to Wikipedia's standards of research.
(Sorry, this is not intended as a flame or anything, it's late at night and I'm kind of worried and stuff. This is supposed to be half funny and stuff. At this point of the night, I'm not sure of how well this works. Probably not very well.)
If Debian decides to mess around with my User-Agent thing, I'm either going to find a really nasty configurative sledgehammer to tune it to say "... Firefox/1.5.0.7 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+pointless-renaming-squabbles+1.5. 0.7-x)", or switching to the official binaries. If my extensions fail to work even a little bit, like some said is possible, I'm switching to the official binaires.
As a normal rational user, I don't care what the app is called as long as it works as expected. (But Firefox is a cute name and I like cute names.) But if it advertises to the others as not being "Firefox", I'm potentially in heaps of trouble - I'm no longer in the 30% of whatever of local crowd who use Firefox, but in the 0.1% who use Some Random Hacked Up Mozilla Engine Derivant, insignificant according to the our-weird-hacks-are-best-experienced-with-major-br owser web design crowd. And let me guess, they'll change the ~/.mozilla/* directory structure accordingly too. If changing branding causes any technical issues within the browser or elsewhere, that's really really bad.
I hear Netscape folks had the bright idea to call the browser Mozilla and let the Marketing call it Netscape SeaAnchor or Netscape UnterseebootKapitan for all they cared. Likewise, I sure hope Debian calls the browser Firefox internally (just casually, you know, kind of like nickname, you can't sue for just using nicknames, can you?), while the developers prepare for the big release of sea-anchor-of-doom packages (or whatever it will be called, my sense of humour just jumped the ship so I'd better quit and go to the bed).
Well, I use Debian. Debian has its own menu system which can generate menu files for specific apps/menu standards (including XDG and Window Maker).
I guess there might be some proggy that converts XDG to Window Maker or other formats... After all, it's just a small matter of converting text stuff to another kind of text stuff, last I checked. Or, someone could spend a few afternoons to write one.
Will the common APIs solve the fact that I cannot paste a PDF web URL in Evince in GNOME and have Evince load it?
I'd wager opening files off the web isn't Evince's forté. It's just meant to show documents. For me it works just fine for me if you paste the URL in Firefox and let it open it in the preferred app, i.e., Evince.
As for Evince not opening URLs directly, well, I just tested it cursorily and it seems like GNOME-VFS can't handle direct file references for some obscure reason. Nor can Nautilus open the file in Evince if you give the URL, saying my PDF is not a directory. So I guess it's a GNOME-VFS limitation, not really Evince's fault. Evince just shows files, don't blame it if it sits on top of a weak VFS layer. =)
And there's also this "attacking scripts in RSS": what was this supposed to mean? My RSS readers don't execute script in RSS. No examples, no links.
Not everyone's using an RSS reader from four years ago. =) Many RSS readers allow rendering of HTML. Heck, I'm using Bloglines, which is a web-based RSS reader; guess whether or not it supports HTML? However, it's up to the client to scrub the content properly and remove <script> crap.
Another question is, exactly how can you expect to launch an attack in a web feed? People use bazillion different RSS/Atom readers, and in many cases they're entirely separate from their web browsers...
Though, I hope people read the Atom spec if they're implementing it, scrubbing HTML content is specifically addressed in the "Security Considerations": "Atom Processors should pay particular attention to the security of the IMG, SCRIPT, EMBED, OBJECT, FRAME, FRAMESET, IFRAME, META, and LINK elements, but other elements might also have negative security properties."
It's because open-source DRM is flat-out impossible. When you distribute software that can play DRM files, it has to include
a) the decryption algorithm
b) the decryption keys
And the reason closed-source DRM is flat-out impossible, right now, is that they're doing exactly that thing now in closed source circles. The decryption key is exchanged somewhere. The decryption algorithm just happens to be buried in assembly code. All the while DRM companies are saying "well, it stops most people. We're hoping it stops all people. Well, we're marketing it as if it stops all people, and when people ask, we just say it stops most people."
It's not that open source DRM is impossible. It's just that effective DRM of any kind is impossible, what exists is ridiculously difficult to implement, and broken six ways every weekend.
Security through obscurity doesn't make the system work any more secure, just a tiny bit harder to break. The security plan has to depend on the presumption that the enemy knows how your system works.
A somewhat working analogy: If you have a bank, you don't want your guard work schedules and patrol routes to fall into the hands of criminals in any case. But in the unlikely event they do fall in wrong hands, what do you rather want them to find out: a) the schedule reveals that without a doubt there's 3-hour period every day where the vault is completely unguarded, or b) the schedules reveals without a doubt that there's six guards in every frigging room all the time and no one can get past them?
Slashdot Mirror
I have two tool docks open in GIMP: One has toolbox, another has layers/palettes/etc.
Having multiple documents open is never pain, because my toolbox is always on left, my other dock is always on right, and the windows are resized so that they overlap with the dock windows but leave a part of them at sight. Need the dock? It's right on sight, just click on it to raise it.
Multiple applications? Um, that's what virtual desktops are for. Need to use another application on the same desktop? I hit Alt+H to hide GIMP, along with all of its windows, to use them. Resume? Middle click on desktop, select any of GIMP's windows from the list, and there we go.
The lesson learned - GIMP isn't pain to use if you use a window manager that doesn't suck. Like Window Maker.
Hi, I'm just a GIMP fan; Krita has cool features, so I have some random questions on how Krita is progressing. (Obligatory disclaimer: Not intended as a troll or anything. I'm just clueless.)
1) Has the UI been fixed? The use of MDI made it difficult as hell to use - X11 has application window groups and virtual desktops for a reason, you know. Can the palettes etc. be docked in separate windows? In 1.5 the stuff can be undocked from the windows, but they're all separate, and their locations aren't particularly well remembered, which makes that feature pretty much useless (Eh, toolbox, 5 tool strips and 3 tool windows open, as opposed to my usual 3-window setup in GIMP, and those locations are remembered - plus they're all duplicated for each window, which is pretty odd)...
2) How's the tablet support? The pressure support in 1.5 appears to be pretty... strange, to say the least. Is there any equivalent of GIMP's ink tool? I couldn't find any from 1.5 based on a cursory examination, and the brush tool didn't work at all like I expected it to work (ticking on the brush transparency made transparency effect work pretty weakly, as happened with the size - I suppose this can be adjusted to have more dramatic effect, but I couldn't find it).
3) Is there anyone who's using both GIMP and Krita; how well does image interchange work between the two apps? I haven't investigated how well I could move .xcfs, for example, between the two apps. I know Krita can use some GIMP bits, like fill patterns and brushes and like; does the opposite work too?
Er... that's a bit wrong.
The reason why it took so long for /. to switch away from extremely broken HTML 3.2 to a lot less broken HTML 4.01 Strict was that it's run by a little bit hackily designed application. It was designed to do a thing. It was not designed with maintainability of HTML in mind.
Slashcode is, I guess, a mass of Perl code that just happens to produce some HTML in a lot of places along the way.
It would have been a lot easier to transition to new version of HTML if Slashcode had been designed ground up with separation of concerns in mind. Back when Slashdot was started, there was this "Perl" thing. Nowadays, people who would start designing a huge news portal weblog engine app in Perl would probably start with Maypole or Catalyst or whatever. There's a big push for MVC-style frameworks right now. I'm developing Ruby on Rails app right now; fixing an app for a completely groundbreaking new version of HTML that breaks all conventions of an earlier version would be relatively straightforward (you just edit all of the stuff in /app/views, perhaps /app/helpers, and that's it, no need to touch your application code!)
As for remembering to close my tags, heck, I remembered to close all tags in this comment. It's not that much harder to type XHTML in a proper editor either - I just hit Ctrl-C, /, and my last tag closes. It's all a matter of getting used to it. =)
Yeah. Just that not every blogger is running an (apparently - I can't tell for sure because I'm not American) really popular blog, and appears to have some sort of important commitee job (again, apparently - I'm not American so I have no idea how relevant the job is, it sounds important...) so the entry has at least weak notability down. I don't see why Wikipedia couldn't cover notable bloggers.
I regularly delete bios of bloggers who don't have this sort of claims of fame. Be sure to tag them with {{db-bio}} if you run across completely nonnotable people. If their notability can't really be established, we're happy to delete them, or at least run them through the deletion process to see if they stick.
Why thank you. Now all I'm waiting for is official packages. =)
"So how are the sales?"
"Well, PS3 sales are pretty much dead, no one buys our other widgets... um..."
"*sigh* Okay, do we have anything that still sells? Batteries?"
"Oh, those still sell, I suppose."
"Great. We used to dominate the console world. Now we sell batteries. Oh well..."
"Except that the laptop batteries are blowing up and no one wants them. But we still have good market hold on the rechargeable AA battery market!"
"Great! We're beaten, we're modest, but one day, one day, we shall get our vengeance!"
There are such methods; ICRA (nee RSACi) is one of them, then there's an older system called SafeSurf. Both are supported (last I checked) by MSIE and censorware packages. Not sure about Firefox or like.
I have only a few beefs with these systems:
Wikipedia's, perhaps, but not Wikimedia Foundation's.
There's Vorbis plugin for Quicktime, and it allows playing Vorbis files in iTunes. Works pretty well if you ask me.
As for video, there's VLC, and it has a native user interface. Looks and feels like QuickTime player, and is just as easy to use as any other Mac application. Except, you know, for the whole fact that you can actually hit Cmd+F and it goes fullscreen, instead of complaining that you have to buy the pro version. And it can do video transcoding fairly easily if you ask it nicely. And it can also play DVDs. Okay, it actually pretty much kills QuickTime Player in every respect. =)
Um, acid2 represents one faction's idea on what an ideal, future-proof CSS implementation should do. It's not be-all end-all test of absolute must-have features of CSS. Gecko doesn't fall too far from the goal, and rest assured they're working on the issues.
I'm not using the beta yet. Um... I would terribly appreciate it if middle-click would do nothing. Currently, on Linux, middle-clicking goes into the URL that I have on selection buffer. Middle click gets clicked by accident awfully often when scrolling and I end up staring at http://www.whateverthecrapihadonclipboardwhenmymou seslipped.com/ (see below).
Um... seems like this can be fixed in about:config. middlemouse.contentLoadURL = false. I think. Didn't know this. Very cool.
Another beef is the automatic expansion of example => http://www.example.com/ which just gives me bunch of false alarms. If I find myself looking at http://www.whateverthecrapihadonclipboardwhenmymou seslipped.com/, I'm going to scream. While I'm at it, it shouldn't even assume I want http:/// there; it should demand full URLs. And above the heck all, if I want to use this as a search engine, I type "g (keywords)", not the plain address - I don't want a search bar, I don't want an intelligent search bar;I just want an ordinary address bar that also has this keyword support thing. Is it too much to ask?
I think this is at least the latter is somehow fixable through about:config, but I forgot the instructions (didn't try it at first because it appeared to have side effects). Setting keyword.url = about:blank, keyword.enabled = false has little effect...
The way I see it, copyright is "communist" in that it's supposed to primarily be a mechanism to control corporate greed, i.e., "you have a temporary limited control over your (or your company's) intellectual property, but note that it's only limited and only temporary - you cannot hold complete and utter control over your creation, and your exclusive rights will expire one day, liberating it for all to use."
Of course, the corporations don't exactly like this shiny outlook and are busy trying to erode whatever rights the consumer has and extending the terms toward perpetuity...
There were multiple variations of the same ad. "Punch the monkey" ad was the first. May have had the shooting ad too. Apparently hitting a moving target in a little box was too difficult for some users, so they switched to a wide-angle taser or something with "Shock the monkey". One click, one kill.
DjVu doesn't do vector art. It's great for scans, but if you have a typesetting program that produces the final file, PDF is the way to go. Keeps text as text, pictures as pictures, and vector art as vector art.
Also the apps that convert stuff to DjVu are a bit wonky on open source side. I seem to have best results on pure black and white scans. Colour documents just don't seem too hot. If I have a bunch of colour comics scans in JPEG format, it's easiest and most space-effective to just use ImageMagick and join them into a PDF. Converting to DjVu means bigger file and lower quality...
Actually, by "which is usually root" you mean "who also happens to know the root password too" or "is in /etc/sudoers". Just because people can use r00t powers on their own machine doesn't mean they want to do that all the time. I sure don't.
And this exploit doesn't requite local access, just access to the X11 sockets. Better make sure X11 isn't accepting any remote connections, and firewall TCP and UDP ports 6000-6007 just to be sure...
Yep. There's a slightly worrying trend in my opinion to use AfD for cleanup - AfDs are crowded as is. I'm personally in favour of imposing cleanup on articles and using AfD for what appear to be extremely hopeless cases. This particular article is in bit of a bind: It's clearly going against verifiability policy right now, which would mean it would need massive cleanups. It really would not need to be deleted if people would actually act when the community consensus is "this article warrants a topic of its own, but the lack of sourcing in the current article stinks". I've stated often verifiability is not a deletion reason. In this case, however, sweeping the whole article out of the door and starting over with strict requirement for good sourcing is a better option.
Perhaps a better way to tackle this would be if AfD could have a procedural rescheduling, as in concluding the deletion debate as "The article is in really bad shape now, but the community doesn't think it's entirely unsalvageable; Relist the article for deletion in April 2007" (6 months). This would need a specific tracking list. This would, in my opinion, keep AfD as an useful tool to whip articles in good shape; if the article has been found awful and near to warranting deletion once, finding it awful 6 months later despite of promises to contrary is bad.
Yeah, I thought having Wikipedia in Plucker format would be really cool, but I had to face the reality that crunching Wikipedia to my 2 megabyte Palm m100 is a bit difficult...
...hmm, well, I suppose I could crunch Wikipedia's Pokémon articles, or something, in this space - or some guides from StrategyWiki...
I'm an active gamer and I have no problems living in Linux all the time.
There's a bunch of really good open source games out there (Battle for Wesnoth and Scorched3D being my current favourites), and a handful of good commercial games (I've got a handful of id Software titles, and Neverwinter Nights). Most of my online gaming these days consists of BfW with my friends. Life on Linux is also really easy if you're a Quake fan. =)
I've also got a rather large bunch of DOS games. All work beautifully in DOSBox without the need for extra stuff. A veritable treasure trove of unbeatable classics, no? And there's also a bunch of software to specifically run old games. Wake me up when someone writes a better RPG than Ultima VII. =)
It also helps if you redefine the problem set a bit. You see, for everything else, I've got a PSone, GameCube and Nintendo DS. I can use these quite smoothly with Linux and get benefits of Modern Gaming and Second-Hand Markets. =)
Last time I checked, no one was telling either of those articles were up for deletion. Both article subjects are clearly up to the notability standards.
And you can't say that Knuckles article is "more notable" by Wikipedia standards than Annan. Notability is fail/pass thing. Knuckles passes. Annan passes.
You're confusing two things: The notability standards and editing priorities. These are entirely separate issues. Notability, being a binary thing, also doesn't have any bearing on the priorities.
Let me tell you about the priorities. Wikipedia happens to be built by ordinary humans. There's to-do lists (And the Wikipedia 1.0 Importance ratings), but people ignore them, pretty obviously, in case they're not interested at the moment or feel they're not qualified to edit the article. People are also not really universal experts. I don't know darn about international politics. I know geek stuff.
The reason why Knuckles article is longer than Annan article is that people think Knuckles is cool and popular, and Annan is just some bigwig at UN. You might as well ask "Why isn't the youth today interested of politics? Why do they just play videogames all day long?" You can trumpet all day that writing a really big article on Annan is really really important, but if you do it just ideologically, it won't work. "We must expand Annan article, just because it makes us look silly when Knuckles article is longer than Annan article" is not inspring. Try listing the problems, and addressing them yourself if you can. "Here, let me tell you what this article could have" is constructive.
Uselessness is highly subjective. As a computer/video gamer I don't think Knuckles article (or any pop culture article) is "useless". And I'm a Nintendo guy. =) But Annan article is important, I'm not doubting that.
There's a whole lot of information in Wikipedia I just plain don't care about, as I don't really care about it in "real life". I'm not doubting it is interesting to some people, however, and I'm not saying it should be removed just because I can't be bothered to read it.
Remember, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with specific goals. It doesn't intend to be a catch-all repository of facts. Think for a second: Would this be a good topic in an encyclopedia? Yes! Would Britannica take this article as it is? Heck no, no, no.
And the most important question of all: Is Wikipedia the end of all knowledge? Can't we do some stuff outside of Wikipedia too? Heck, Wikipedia seems to quote a lot of stuff from outside, don't they...
Instead of "My favourite topic doesn't fly with Wikipedia, their methodology apparently sucks, therefore Wikipedia sucks", you didn't think of doing the constructive thing: "My favourite topic doesn't fly with Wikipedia, as it conflicts with their goals and policies; How could we rebuild this article in a way that it doesn't conflict with their goals and policies, and generate an external source that could benefit not only Wikipedia, but Slashdot community as well?" It's entirely understandable to get mad if you get slapped. It's prudent to get up and think of what to do to repair the damage.
The reason the article is up for deletion is not "dubious" at all.
This article (and other Slashdot culture articles that were up on AfD lately) was basically formed like this: A bunch of Slashdotters visit Wikipedia, someone gets the bright idea "hey, it would be cool if we had an article on Slashdot trolling." They begin working on the article, adding random bits of troll-lore.
Which is all fine with regular Slashdotters. They know it's right. They won't challenge a single word. I mean, I wouldn't.
But then comes the problem: Someone who's a bit skeptical. Someone who's probably new to Slashdot and don't know a lot about what's going on here. They want to know if this stuff is really true. They can come to Slashdot and read (Score: -1, Troll) comments all day; They can conclude that the article may be basically right, but they can't find an authority that says so. They can't tell if all these people who have been editing the article are "authorities" or not. Other articles have sources that can easily be used to verify that stuff. Stuff written by experts and journalists. Good enough.
I can't remember if I edited this particular article, but I think I edited the "recurring jokes" article (how silly of me, considering I was in favour of deleting it): A curious user can check that "Hmm, User:Wwwwolf added something about Evil Bits;" (pokepokepoke) "Yep, this is WWWWolf (#2428) on Slashdot, he's probably been there long enough to remember the pain and blood and suffering of that fateful April Fools Day, 2003." But can they do the same research on all "experts"? Even the ones behind an IP addy? (As a side note, I really hope Citizendium folks have an answer to this problem!)
The article doesn't point to three-digit-UID user's peer-reviewed work that explores the trolling in a conclusive way.
That's what Wikipedia demands; It doesn't demand the users to be experts, it demands the users quote or paraphrase or summarise an expert's work, as "expert" is defined by society at large. If you're an expert of some field and editing Wikipedia, that does help, because you probably have a good idea on who taught you.
[I'm supposed to be an "expert" on computer science, and I can easily say: "I'll write something about some design pattern. Hmm, didn't Martin Fowler write something about this?" ...or "Hmm, someone doesn't have a good source on this claim about shell sort. Hey, Knuth's TAoCP had something about this..."]
Don't get me wrong: The way this article was built was marvellous. I like it a lot. However, it's not a good way to build a good Wikipedia article according to Wikipedia's policies. It's a good demonstration on how wiki concept can accumulate information. It's a bad example of an article according to Wikipedia's standards of research.
So what's my recommenda
(Sorry, this is not intended as a flame or anything, it's late at night and I'm kind of worried and stuff. This is supposed to be half funny and stuff. At this point of the night, I'm not sure of how well this works. Probably not very well.)
If Debian decides to mess around with my User-Agent thing, I'm either going to find a really nasty configurative sledgehammer to tune it to say "... Firefox/1.5.0.7 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+pointless-renaming-squabbles+1.5. 0.7-x)", or switching to the official binaries. If my extensions fail to work even a little bit, like some said is possible, I'm switching to the official binaires.
As a normal rational user, I don't care what the app is called as long as it works as expected. (But Firefox is a cute name and I like cute names.) But if it advertises to the others as not being "Firefox", I'm potentially in heaps of trouble - I'm no longer in the 30% of whatever of local crowd who use Firefox, but in the 0.1% who use Some Random Hacked Up Mozilla Engine Derivant, insignificant according to the our-weird-hacks-are-best-experienced-with-major-br owser web design crowd. And let me guess, they'll change the ~/.mozilla/* directory structure accordingly too. If changing branding causes any technical issues within the browser or elsewhere, that's really really bad.
I hear Netscape folks had the bright idea to call the browser Mozilla and let the Marketing call it Netscape SeaAnchor or Netscape UnterseebootKapitan for all they cared. Likewise, I sure hope Debian calls the browser Firefox internally (just casually, you know, kind of like nickname, you can't sue for just using nicknames, can you?), while the developers prepare for the big release of sea-anchor-of-doom packages (or whatever it will be called, my sense of humour just jumped the ship so I'd better quit and go to the bed).
You're not the only user. =)
Well, I use Debian. Debian has its own menu system which can generate menu files for specific apps/menu standards (including XDG and Window Maker).
I guess there might be some proggy that converts XDG to Window Maker or other formats... After all, it's just a small matter of converting text stuff to another kind of text stuff, last I checked. Or, someone could spend a few afternoons to write one.
I'd wager opening files off the web isn't Evince's forté. It's just meant to show documents. For me it works just fine for me if you paste the URL in Firefox and let it open it in the preferred app, i.e., Evince.
As for Evince not opening URLs directly, well, I just tested it cursorily and it seems like GNOME-VFS can't handle direct file references for some obscure reason. Nor can Nautilus open the file in Evince if you give the URL, saying my PDF is not a directory. So I guess it's a GNOME-VFS limitation, not really Evince's fault. Evince just shows files, don't blame it if it sits on top of a weak VFS layer. =)
Hmm, right now, the only name that springs in mind would be Alaa, who runs Egyptian LUG. Not sure if he developed anything though =)
Not everyone's using an RSS reader from four years ago. =) Many RSS readers allow rendering of HTML. Heck, I'm using Bloglines, which is a web-based RSS reader; guess whether or not it supports HTML? However, it's up to the client to scrub the content properly and remove <script> crap.
Another question is, exactly how can you expect to launch an attack in a web feed? People use bazillion different RSS/Atom readers, and in many cases they're entirely separate from their web browsers...
Though, I hope people read the Atom spec if they're implementing it, scrubbing HTML content is specifically addressed in the "Security Considerations": "Atom Processors should pay particular attention to the security of the IMG, SCRIPT, EMBED, OBJECT, FRAME, FRAMESET, IFRAME, META, and LINK elements, but other elements might also have negative security properties."
And the reason closed-source DRM is flat-out impossible, right now, is that they're doing exactly that thing now in closed source circles. The decryption key is exchanged somewhere. The decryption algorithm just happens to be buried in assembly code. All the while DRM companies are saying "well, it stops most people. We're hoping it stops all people. Well, we're marketing it as if it stops all people, and when people ask, we just say it stops most people."
It's not that open source DRM is impossible. It's just that effective DRM of any kind is impossible, what exists is ridiculously difficult to implement, and broken six ways every weekend.
Security through obscurity doesn't make the system work any more secure, just a tiny bit harder to break. The security plan has to depend on the presumption that the enemy knows how your system works.
A somewhat working analogy: If you have a bank, you don't want your guard work schedules and patrol routes to fall into the hands of criminals in any case. But in the unlikely event they do fall in wrong hands, what do you rather want them to find out: a) the schedule reveals that without a doubt there's 3-hour period every day where the vault is completely unguarded, or b) the schedules reveals without a doubt that there's six guards in every frigging room all the time and no one can get past them?