It's got a lot of hype, sure, but is it really famous? I'm not so sure. Certainly more people have heard of PHP and Perl, and while Python's a little more iffy in that regard it's probably still more well-known.
Agreed. Anyone in doubt as to what language to learn next probably either already knows these languages or has already decided against them for whatever reason.
Firefox released a public build that passed Acid2 in December 2006.
That was not a final release. The general public doesn't use prereleases, and so prereleases don't count.
According to some sources (including Ian Hickson, who developed the Acid2 test), IE 8 Beta 1 still does not pass.
Yes, because of the horrible quirks-switch that was planned for IE8. That switch has been removed, and it was the only remaining obstacle.
Firefox (along with Opera and Safari) has far surpassed IE in standards compliance.
Opera and Safari, yes. Firefox still lags behind on the standards that people care about: so far behind, in fact, that IE actually has a shot at catching up. How pathetic is that? Certainly Firefox has made great strides in standards that few people have any plans to use, but the everyday stuff has been sorely neglected for the sake of the relatively obscure.
Can we stop it with the Firefox FUD?
It is not my intent to spread FUD. I use Firefox myself, among a wide spread of browsers. But I am not comfortable with the fact that the browser which made Web standards a household term has deprioritized the very thing that made it so good.
I thought we were glad that Firefox is helping to get MS off its rear to get IE up to speed with the other browsers?
"We" are, but Firefox has been resting on its laurels for too long, and the roles have reversed: now it seems it's IE's turn to get Mozilla off its rear to get Firefox up to speed with the other browsers. How pathetic is that?
:Could Apple face regulators for restricting third party development on THEIR SOFTWARE which is on THEIR HARDWARE which does not in any sense of the word have a monopoly.
By the time someone would be installing applications on an iPhone, it is not "Apple's hardware" anymore. That ended when the buyer paid for it. My iPhone is my property, and I will install whatever I please on it. If Apple tries to stop me, I will do my utmost to stop their intrusion onto my property by any means necessary. This is a simple case of property rights.
Oh, I agree, and that's why a balance needs to be struck at some point. The whole issue with the current administration and privacy is that even if they're not trying to destroy that balance -and frankly, I have my doubts- they are most certainly pushing it in an inappropriate direction: increased governmental power over the people without a corresponding increase in the power of the people over the government.
People need dignity, but they do not need to be coddled. People need to be able to make mistakes, but they do not need to be sheltered from the consequences of those mistakes. People need to be able to make suppositions, but they do not need to not be judged: if you can't handle a little opposition then that's your own problem and nobody else's. Likewise, while people need to be able to challenge the ideas of society, they do not need to do so in an opposition-free environment.
Privacy is necessary, but for better reasons than the ones you claim.
If these acid tests are based on standards. Why is the only acid test that passes the W3C validator, the Acid 1 test?
Because more recent Web standards include sections on how certain kinds of errors are supposed to be handled. These need to be tested just like everything else, but up until Acid2 many browsers weren't very good about that.
Remember, the point of Acid tests is to be a thorn in browser developers' sides: find areas of the standard that no one currently does well and test for them. Browsers shouldn't pass Acid tests when the tests first come out: that would be missing the point of the tests in the first place.
The Acid tests are not made to pat browser vendors on the back. They exist to show areas in the standards that still aren't covered well. Browsers should fail when the test is first released. that shows that the people making the tests have done their job right by covering areas that are still spotty when it comes to implementation.
Of course, there's the fact that the browser which made Web standards famous will be the very last non-IE browser to pass Acid2, despite having had over two years to fix the issues, when the iCab guy managed it in less than a month. But I suspect that the answers there are more political than technical.
There is a very clear difference between HD and SD tv, a difference that anyone can see.
Only on very large screens at relatively short distances.
HD has more detail and colors are more vibrant.
The colors in HD are not inherently more vibrant. What you are seeing is either a result of proper screen calibration, digital transmissions (something not unique to HD), or a simple placebo effect. To be perfectly honest, I suspect it's a combination of all three, and something easily doable in SD.
As for "more detail," again that only matters for very large screens at relatively short viewing distances. With a longer viewing distance or a smaller screen, the added details are too small for the human eye to recognize. While this is not exactly basic biology or optics, it's still not outside the realm of a high-school course.
unless your 1/2 blind, standard def is not as good as high def. end of story.
No, not end of story. Human vision doesn't work that way.
no strawman arguements like "if i view a 51cm screen from 10m away it looks the same".
If I view a 60cm screen from 3m away it looks the same, and that's a far more realistic scenario than the one you describe. HD is a waste for most of the population: anyone who isn't a home-theater nut.
Facts are data. Theories are interpretations of data. As such, evolution and gravity are theories, not facts. This does not mean that they are guesses; there's another term for that, and even the creationists don't use that term to describe either of these. Just as a theory is not a fact, neither is it a hypothesis.
I have no doubt that the people moving to emphasize that evolution is a theory rather than a fact are indeed ignorant of just what a theory really is. But so are their opponents who attempt to claim it as a fact. Both sides need a dictionary.
Corporate influence over Congress has been way past acceptable levels for a lot longer than eight years, even in the sphere of intellectual property. Even the DMCA is ten years old.
I recognize the temptation to blame Bush, but this is too old and it runs too deep to pin on him alone.
My typical memory-burning web surfing session is to go to Google News or especially to Fark.com, open up about 100 tabs of potentially interesting news stories, and then go read them one at a time, closing each one after I've read it. It's one thing to have the browser use lots of memory while I've got all the tabs open - but when I've finished with them all, and just have the original page back, or even hit "Home" to get "about:blank", the browser typically *still* has over 100MB of RAM and is often burning 20-70% of CPU. That's a memory leak!.
Not necessarily; all that means is that Firefox isn't freeing up memory at a time when you think it should. It could very well be freeing up that memory at a different time, one the programmers deemed more appropriate. Is this the case? I don't know, and neither do you. It would be in your best interests to dig a little deeper than anecdotal evidence with a sample size of one before making accusations like this.
The Times says that as video games become more popular hard-core gamers are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience.
No; adolescent males are becoming an ever-smaller part of the audience. More mature gamers, both older and younger, both hardcore and casual, want something very different from the testosterone-soaked boom-fest FPS of the month.
The Wii Remote tracks its position via an infrared sensor that users must attach to their televisions. However, the Motus Darwin measures absolute position with respect to earth itself. Using gyroscopes and accelerometers, the controller orients itself to the magnetic north, and senses the direction it is pointing.
Both of those statements are false. Regarding the first statement: contrary to its name, the Wii "Sensor Bar" is not actually a sensor at all. It's an infrared beacon which gives the Wii Remote a point of reference from which to track its position. The actual sensing is done in the Wii Remote itself, using the light given off by the sensor bar. This is why people have been able to "hack" a replacement sensor bar candles, which wouldn't be possible if the sensor bar were actually required to sense anything.
The second statement is not possible: determining position requires a point of reference, and the article lists none. I don't doubt that this controller uses some sort of reference point, but it most definitely does not sense that point through gyroscopes and accelerometers alone.
Notepad coders (you know who you are) who like simple, clean, easily manageable pages get a new layer of complexity.
Notepad coders who don't have a clue, you mean? I prefer hand-coding myself, and CSS has made my pages far simpler, cleaner, and more easily manageable. I don't have any sympathy for people who talk hardcore but don't take the time to learn things that make their own preferred methods much easier.
Twenty is too long, but I agree that five is way too short. I'd go to seven with an optional seven-year extension (for a total of fourteen) much like the original copyright scheme used in the US.
Since Nintendo is pulling its hardware ads, why not put some proper marketing on its games? Seriously; the only Nintendo game I've even seen a magazine ad for in over a year was Fire Emblem, and I only saw that one in comic books. If Nintendo wants to reach casual gamers, then it needs to start promoting its ads in places casual gamers go, and hardcore-gaming venues just don't fit that description. Word of mouth alone won't make a million seller.
Simply put, levels are not some mere archaism, no mere relic of some time when people "settled" for "inferior" games because the ZOMGGRAFIXXXX weren't up to this day's misguided standards. They are a valid method of game design, and do not need to die out just because some GTA fanboy with narrow tastes doesn't like the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
And in this post as well: Six kills Dumbledore.
It's got a lot of hype, sure, but is it really famous? I'm not so sure. Certainly more people have heard of PHP and Perl, and while Python's a little more iffy in that regard it's probably still more well-known.
Agreed. Anyone in doubt as to what language to learn next probably either already knows these languages or has already decided against them for whatever reason.
Firefox released a public build that passed Acid2 in December 2006.
That was not a final release. The general public doesn't use prereleases, and so prereleases don't count.
According to some sources (including Ian Hickson, who developed the Acid2 test), IE 8 Beta 1 still does not pass.
Yes, because of the horrible quirks-switch that was planned for IE8. That switch has been removed, and it was the only remaining obstacle.
Firefox (along with Opera and Safari) has far surpassed IE in standards compliance.
Opera and Safari, yes. Firefox still lags behind on the standards that people care about: so far behind, in fact, that IE actually has a shot at catching up. How pathetic is that? Certainly Firefox has made great strides in standards that few people have any plans to use, but the everyday stuff has been sorely neglected for the sake of the relatively obscure.
Can we stop it with the Firefox FUD?
It is not my intent to spread FUD. I use Firefox myself, among a wide spread of browsers. But I am not comfortable with the fact that the browser which made Web standards a household term has deprioritized the very thing that made it so good.
I thought we were glad that Firefox is helping to get MS off its rear to get IE up to speed with the other browsers?
"We" are, but Firefox has been resting on its laurels for too long, and the roles have reversed: now it seems it's IE's turn to get Mozilla off its rear to get Firefox up to speed with the other browsers. How pathetic is that?
:Could Apple face regulators for restricting third party development on THEIR SOFTWARE which is on THEIR HARDWARE which does not in any sense of the word have a monopoly.
By the time someone would be installing applications on an iPhone, it is not "Apple's hardware" anymore. That ended when the buyer paid for it. My iPhone is my property, and I will install whatever I please on it. If Apple tries to stop me, I will do my utmost to stop their intrusion onto my property by any means necessary. This is a simple case of property rights.
Oh, I agree, and that's why a balance needs to be struck at some point. The whole issue with the current administration and privacy is that even if they're not trying to destroy that balance -and frankly, I have my doubts- they are most certainly pushing it in an inappropriate direction: increased governmental power over the people without a corresponding increase in the power of the people over the government.
People need dignity, but they do not need to be coddled. People need to be able to make mistakes, but they do not need to be sheltered from the consequences of those mistakes. People need to be able to make suppositions, but they do not need to not be judged: if you can't handle a little opposition then that's your own problem and nobody else's. Likewise, while people need to be able to challenge the ideas of society, they do not need to do so in an opposition-free environment.
Privacy is necessary, but for better reasons than the ones you claim.
The goal of privacy isn't to have power over people. Quite the opposite, actually: it's to keep people from having power over you.
If these acid tests are based on standards. Why is the only acid test that passes the W3C validator, the Acid 1 test?
Because more recent Web standards include sections on how certain kinds of errors are supposed to be handled. These need to be tested just like everything else, but up until Acid2 many browsers weren't very good about that.
Remember, the point of Acid tests is to be a thorn in browser developers' sides: find areas of the standard that no one currently does well and test for them. Browsers shouldn't pass Acid tests when the tests first come out: that would be missing the point of the tests in the first place.
The Acid tests are not made to pat browser vendors on the back. They exist to show areas in the standards that still aren't covered well. Browsers should fail when the test is first released. that shows that the people making the tests have done their job right by covering areas that are still spotty when it comes to implementation.
Of course, there's the fact that the browser which made Web standards famous will be the very last non-IE browser to pass Acid2, despite having had over two years to fix the issues, when the iCab guy managed it in less than a month. But I suspect that the answers there are more political than technical.
There is a very clear difference between HD and SD tv, a difference that anyone can see.
Only on very large screens at relatively short distances.
HD has more detail and colors are more vibrant.
The colors in HD are not inherently more vibrant. What you are seeing is either a result of proper screen calibration, digital transmissions (something not unique to HD), or a simple placebo effect. To be perfectly honest, I suspect it's a combination of all three, and something easily doable in SD.
As for "more detail," again that only matters for very large screens at relatively short viewing distances. With a longer viewing distance or a smaller screen, the added details are too small for the human eye to recognize. While this is not exactly basic biology or optics, it's still not outside the realm of a high-school course.
unless your 1/2 blind, standard def is not as good as high def. end of story.
No, not end of story. Human vision doesn't work that way.
no strawman arguements like "if i view a 51cm screen from 10m away it looks the same".
If I view a 60cm screen from 3m away it looks the same, and that's a far more realistic scenario than the one you describe. HD is a waste for most of the population: anyone who isn't a home-theater nut.
Interesting, even impressive, but call me when they get surstromming into orbit.
Facts are data. Theories are interpretations of data. As such, evolution and gravity are theories, not facts. This does not mean that they are guesses; there's another term for that, and even the creationists don't use that term to describe either of these. Just as a theory is not a fact, neither is it a hypothesis.
I have no doubt that the people moving to emphasize that evolution is a theory rather than a fact are indeed ignorant of just what a theory really is. But so are their opponents who attempt to claim it as a fact. Both sides need a dictionary.
Corporate influence over Congress has been way past acceptable levels for a lot longer than eight years, even in the sphere of intellectual property. Even the DMCA is ten years old.
I recognize the temptation to blame Bush, but this is too old and it runs too deep to pin on him alone.
My typical memory-burning web surfing session is to go to Google News or especially to Fark.com, open up about 100 tabs of potentially interesting news stories, and then go read them one at a time, closing each one after I've read it. It's one thing to have the browser use lots of memory while I've got all the tabs open - but when I've finished with them all, and just have the original page back, or even hit "Home" to get "about:blank", the browser typically *still* has over 100MB of RAM and is often burning 20-70% of CPU. That's a memory leak!.
Not necessarily; all that means is that Firefox isn't freeing up memory at a time when you think it should. It could very well be freeing up that memory at a different time, one the programmers deemed more appropriate. Is this the case? I don't know, and neither do you. It would be in your best interests to dig a little deeper than anecdotal evidence with a sample size of one before making accusations like this.
The Times says that as video games become more popular hard-core gamers are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience.
No; adolescent males are becoming an ever-smaller part of the audience. More mature gamers, both older and younger, both hardcore and casual, want something very different from the testosterone-soaked boom-fest FPS of the month.
The Wii is for everyone, as gaming should be. Yes, even insecure adolescent males.
How is it that the "big three" platforms doesn't include the biggest selling console?
Because the biggest selling console doesn't let them do easy graphics-are-everything cash-ins.
The Wii Remote tracks its position via an infrared sensor that users must attach to their televisions. However, the Motus Darwin measures absolute position with respect to earth itself. Using gyroscopes and accelerometers, the controller orients itself to the magnetic north, and senses the direction it is pointing.
Both of those statements are false. Regarding the first statement: contrary to its name, the Wii "Sensor Bar" is not actually a sensor at all. It's an infrared beacon which gives the Wii Remote a point of reference from which to track its position. The actual sensing is done in the Wii Remote itself, using the light given off by the sensor bar. This is why people have been able to "hack" a replacement sensor bar candles, which wouldn't be possible if the sensor bar were actually required to sense anything.
The second statement is not possible: determining position requires a point of reference, and the article lists none. I don't doubt that this controller uses some sort of reference point, but it most definitely does not sense that point through gyroscopes and accelerometers alone.
Notepad coders (you know who you are) who like simple, clean, easily manageable pages get a new layer of complexity.
Notepad coders who don't have a clue, you mean? I prefer hand-coding myself, and CSS has made my pages far simpler, cleaner, and more easily manageable. I don't have any sympathy for people who talk hardcore but don't take the time to learn things that make their own preferred methods much easier.
I'd settle for just being able to paint doors. Especially red ones.
Twenty is too long, but I agree that five is way too short. I'd go to seven with an optional seven-year extension (for a total of fourteen) much like the original copyright scheme used in the US.
Since Nintendo is pulling its hardware ads, why not put some proper marketing on its games? Seriously; the only Nintendo game I've even seen a magazine ad for in over a year was Fire Emblem, and I only saw that one in comic books. If Nintendo wants to reach casual gamers, then it needs to start promoting its ads in places casual gamers go, and hardcore-gaming venues just don't fit that description. Word of mouth alone won't make a million seller.
Simply put, levels are not some mere archaism, no mere relic of some time when people "settled" for "inferior" games because the ZOMGGRAFIXXXX weren't up to this day's misguided standards. They are a valid method of game design, and do not need to die out just because some GTA fanboy with narrow tastes doesn't like the idea.