What part of "It's faster than the G4" and "We tried, but couldn't fit a G5 in it" don't you get?
The part where they didn't bother using their research and development to improve an elegant and clean architecture, as Apple has had a long history of doing in the past. Contrary to their marketing, IBM was more than capable of delivering the goods, as was shown barely a month after the initial announcement.
Not mine. I've no intention of going to Windows; I'll be using Linux. Not that Linux doesn't have its warts, but those can be worked around. I intend to work on addressing those issues, in the hope of toppling OSX's remaining advantages.
I've used Macs since 1984. It didn't matter that they were more expensive: they consistently used the best technology available, and this made them worth it. This is not the first time that Apple has stepped back from that -witness the switch to ATA drives over SCSI- but it is the final straw for me. I don't intend to move to Windows, anyway; it's Linux all the way for me.
By the way, the x86 switchover isn't the only reason I'm switching. The TPM module is another. Even if they'd stuck with a superior architecture, I refuse to use DRM-crippled hardware.
Well, what do you know. As Apple pushes the state of personal computing back by 20 years, it seems I was right all along: even with Jobs' relentless quest for cheap-over-good, Apple has no intention of passing the savings onto its userbase. Rather than improve an elegant architecture, they have chosen to go with Intel's cesspool because of a few marketing numbers, and the users will eat it up like candy.
Very well. I had hoped that Apple would take long enough to introduce these systems that I would at least be able to get one more purchase in, but I never anticipated needing a new machine this year, and this doesn't change that. It just means that I'm using my last Macs, instead of my second-to-last ones. If I'm going to be forced to use a garbage architecture like x86 in the future, I want to at least get my money's worth out of the machines I buy. With the move to Intel, particularly with the Apple tax intact as I knew it would be, Macs are no longer different enough from other personal computers to justify the price premium.
'Accessibility' and 'Lowest Common Denominator'
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Open Source Accessibility
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· Score: 2, Informative
Whoah, hold on! Protecting the rights of the disabled is not, as you say, sinking to the lowest common denominator.
Might it be better to say that protecting the rights of the disabled need not be sinking to the lowest common denominator?
Most if not all accessibility standards can be implemented in ways which do not detract from the ability of those who don't require them work to the best of their abiliy. It would be difficult to argue, for example, that cutting a small ramp into a curb and sidewalk for those who can't step up onto it detracts from the ability of those who don't need the ramp to use the sidewalk or the road.
However, most of those standards can also be implemented in ways which do detract from the the experience fo. Going back to the curb example, if the ramp were to be built out from the curb rather than being cut into it, those using the road would face a small but very real obstacles at the points where the ramps were built. This would be more of an issue for wheeled vehicles than pedestrians, but it would affect a group negatively, and the point of accessibility is to not do that.
If Office were to support OpenDocument, then there would be no problem here: those who require the greater accessibility of Office could use it, while those who preferred OpenOffice.Org and didn't need Office for accessibility could use OOO. Last I checked, the law only mandates a file format, not what app is used to work with the files. As long as an app supports the standardized format, nothing else matters. It could be open-source or closed-source, made by Microsoft or Apple or some loose band of programmers, and it could support whatever other file formats the creators desired. As long as support for this particular format is somewhere on the list of features, nothing else matters, and that is as it should be.
Standards are protocols, not applications. Massachusetts understood this when they passed their OpenDocument law. It's not about screwing Microsoft over, though that may happen if MS continues to stubbornly refuse to support real standards. It's about making documents accessible and interoperable.
Open-Source is not socialism for one simple reason. Socialism, by definition, mandates sharing through force of law. Open-Source does not attempt to mandate anything through force of law, except that it stay shared itself.
The difference is key, because it makes Open-Source a choice, much like any other, and freedom of choice is what capitalism and individualism are all about. A truly socialist Open-Source license could probably be written -such a license would probably mandate that the user release all of his code as Open-Source, even if the user's apps take no code from any Open-Source applications- but I doubt that such a license would catch on.
The problem is that the Gecko team seems to have decided that CSS support is no longer a priority. Frankly, the big reason for this -as far as I can tell- is that they finally got bored with CSS and wanted to move on to implementing NEW, EXCITING standards like SVG which aren't seeing a lot of Web use yet, rather than the standards people are already using and want to use more.
I consider this to be a problem. Acid2 is horrible as actual testcases go, but as a benchmark it's a very important step, and the development team which once led the push for standards doesn't consider it a priority. This position brushes uncomfortably close to hypocrisy, given their loud (and completely justified) cry for standards support in browsers. New standards are good things. I have no intention of arguing otherwise, and I don't think most technical people would either. SVG will eventually be a very useful thing to have in a browser, and I don't think anyone is going to argue against that, but note the word eventually.
Isn't getting existing standards right more important than implementing new ones? To start on the new before perfecting the old sounds like a marketing-centric perspective, rather than a technology-centric one. This isn't even to say that marketing isn't important -it is- but the Gecko team should know better than to let marketing dictate what to prioritize. That's what led to Netscape 6 being released before Gecko had even reached the 1.0 stage, which is in turn what really drove the last nail into Netscape's reputation. Netscape 7 was a valiant attempt at reviving it, but by then it was too late.
I hope the Gecko team gets its priorities straight after the 1.5 release. I still use it on Windows, and I want to go back to Gecko other platforms. But they've rested on their standards-support laurels for too long; one of the other major engines (KHTML) has beaten them to the punch, and the second (Opera) is not far behind. Even the IE developers have announced that Acid2-compliance will eventually be coming to IE, though not in the IE7 release, but we have yet to hear any real commitment from the Gecko guys. This is -or should be- not just embarrassing, but outright humiliating for the Gecko team, and yet every time they're asked about it they either brush it off or get all defensive -even rude- about it.
Seriously. As a battle-scarred veteran of Discrete Mathematics myself -a class I've mostly managed to repress the memory of- yes, math is hard, particularly in a class which takes skills you've taken for granted since forst grade, such as counting, and turns them on their ear. Engineering is hard to, largely because it requires mathematical skills. If you're not willing to put in the effort to learn, you're not going to do well.
News flash: Engineering is not for everyone. Clearly it wasn't for the author of this article. Perhaps something in our culture has shifted in ways which make fewer students amenable to challenging subjects. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case, though I've no clue as to how that would work.
Certainly the idea of regulating political Weblogs leaves a bad taste in my mouth. However, if you don't regulate them, then you've blown such a huge hole in campaign finance reform that you've essentially rendered it meaningless. The 2004 elections proved that rather handily.
So the real question is, is campaign finance reform worth it? Certainly it's a good concept, but if you have to severely restrict free speech in order to make it meaningful, is it worth doing at all? I'm not sure it is.
Java is a compiled language, even though it compiles to portable bytecode. Why, then, shouldn't Python also be considered compiled? The only real difference between the Java and Python methods -at least as far as this is concerned- is that Python makes the compilation process transparent.
Certainly there are many differences between Python and Java at the language level. When it comes to compilation, though, they're basically the same.
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?
That's exactly right. HR folks don't know much about computers, and so they can't simply test you; they wouldn't know what to do. But they do understand pieces of paper like diplomas and degrees as being important. Supposedly, certifications were created to translate technical knowledge into pieces of paper. Whether they actually serve that purpose or not is debatable.
It's quite possible to implement only the syndication part of Atom, offering the feed but not the API. If you do this, then Atom is no more of a security threat than RSS is. The only threat would be if the site were to inadvertently publish sensitive information, and this is an issue no matter what format you publish it in, be it Atom, RSS, HTML, or something else.
Even if you do implement the publication API, Atom includes features to address security concerns. As such, it is no more of a security risk than any of the other Weblog APIs out there.
That's the beauty of atom: although syndication and publication are closely related, you can implement them separately. Many services implement the syndication but not the publication already. Implementing the publication without the syndication would be pretty strange, but you could do it if you really wanted to.
One, the NWS predates AccuWeather, both in general and in terms of Web presence. So in this case it's the private sector competing against the government, not the reverse; AccuWeather is the newcomer. Are you suggesting that if some guy wants to provide a service which the government already performs, the government should simply stop providing that service so the guy can have a monopoly? Businesses have no inherent right to success in a capitalist system; they (ideally) earn their success by being better than the alternatives. AccuWeather is not trying to keep the government from starting a new service; it's trying to force the government to dismantle a service which existed long before they did. Whether the government ought to be providing that service in the first place may be a matter of debate, but it's beyond the scope of this question.
Two, others have already pointed out that AccuWeather does surprisingly little work of its own. It takes data collected at taxpayer expense, repackages it, and sells it. Certainly AccuWeather has the right to try doing this if they want, but what right to they have to say that the government shouldn't provide that same data to anyone else it wants? AccuWeather is not paying for this data; there is no contractual relationship between them and the government. If they want a contract, that's fine, but they should pay for it in that case; after all, one-sided contracts aren't valid.
My tags should have the meaning I give them, more or less. If I use h1 as you suggest, the default h1-values will be mixed with my own values, and I have to think a bit harder.
You're a developer. Thinking is your job, so that the end user (be it the actual person or their user-agent) doesn't have to. You can reset the default h1-values to whatever you want. In most browsers, that means simply resetting font-family, font-size, and the margins, which odds are you would be doing anyway.
Almost all of the -moz sttributes correspond directly to attributes proposed for CSS3, and they're mostly implemented as per the current proposal. However, CSS3 has not been finalized, and there is a small but nonzero chance that these attributes will somehow change. If that were to happen, then (for example) opacity: might work one way on earlier versions of Mozilla and differently on later ones. This is a Bad Thing, because it prevents pages from degrading gracefully.
Using the -moz prefix avoids this problem. If the standard is finalized without any changes, then opacity: and -moz-opacity: can use the same code, and that will be that. If the standard changes, however, then opacity: can be implemented according to the new standard, -moz-opacity: can continue according to the old implementation (since it was never standardized anyway), and neither old nor new pages will break.
Incidentally, the CSS specs suggest exactly this solution, and I believe they actually use the -moz prefix as an example. KHTML and WebCore have a similar scheme, though they use a -khtml prefix. It would be nice if IE started using an -ie prefix in the future for its own stuff, though it seems unlikely that this will happen.
Why? I really don't understand this, what's wrong with divs?
Nothing is inherently wrong with divs, as long as you keep in mind that divs don't mean anything, and that a meaningful tag is always preferable when one is available.
To illustrate this, let's look at some common page-design tasks. Suppose that you want your page's title (which you'll type in text) and an image to appear at the top of your page. Many people would tell you to use a div with an id of 'head' to wrap everything, but there's a better way: simply use an h1 tag and give it a background and background-image. By using a meaningful tag for your page header, you've cut out excess HTML code, and the result is more elegant.
Let's say, however, that you want more than just text and an image in your header. Suppose, for example,that you want to do something like Slashdot, using text, an image, and more images representing the last several categories that have been updated. There is no one tag that can encompass all of this, and so here we have a case where a div is appropriate. Give it a meaningful ID -'header' is a common choice- and put your header elements inside it.
The rule for elegant code is to use the most meaningful tags which will do what you want. DIV tags are suitable when nothing else is available, and there are times when that happens. However, they should not be used when better tags exist.
Consider games like this, which could never have worked on any of the other systems. This is simply the continuation of something that started with Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles - the creation of games which wouldn't work well with only one screen per player. It's a new gameplay mechanic, and it's still being explored, so there aren't too many good games with it yet. This game, however, sounds like the latest in a handful of solid hits.
Apple has several APIs which allow access to Aqua. C and C++ are typically expected to use Carbon, but Apple has been doing some interesting things recently with calling Cocoa from otherwise-Carbon code.
If they're going to bump it up that much...
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Firefox 1.1 Scrapped
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I want to see Acid2 compliance.
I understand that Acid2 is not the be-all and end-all of CSS testing. However, I think it's difficult to deny that it is an important benchmark, and Firefox is seriously behind the pack. WebCore, KHTML, and Opera have already managed this in their development code (with the WebCore and KHTML engines already available to the public), and iCab has a compliant release version already. No news yet on IE7, but at this rate Gecko faces a real chance of being dead last to get Acid2 compliance among the major browser engines. That's just sad.
Again, I understand that Acid2 is not the be-all and end-all of CSS compliance testing. In fact, as test cases go, it's not even all that great. However, it's difficult to deny its importance as a benchmark, and the Gecko crew is getting some pretty serious egg on its face here.
It's not my intent to bash Firefox. I'm an avid Firefox fan on Mac, Windows, and Linux alike. I think it gets a lot of things right. But I also think that in this case, they're getting their priorities wrong.
Hold the hacker personally liable for all damage which results, in both civil and criminal senses.
On the civil side, the cracker/author/whatever could be sued to recover any financial damages, on a first-come first-served basis. The one catch here is that only actual damages may be awarded in a case, rather than punitive damages. This is not so much to protect the author from further financial harm, since all of his assets are likely to be drained anyway, but more to ensure that as many bodies as possible can recoup whatever damage is incurred.
On the criminal side, the author is considered to have directly caused all damage resulting from the virus. The crimes are not considered premeditated unless the virus or hack specifically targeted a person or group for damage. In any case, these charges will almost certainly include many counts of theft and/or fraud, but could even include manslaughter if actual deaths result. If police departments or courthouses are hit, then the charges might also include obstruction of justice.
This law does not bring the death penalty into things (unless you can somehow bring up a premeditated murder charge, which would be quite difficult), but it does no more or less than hold the author/cracker/whatever responsible for the consequences of his or her actions. The sentences for such things are likely to sound outrageous and extreme, but they would in fact be no more than what a person who travelled to all of these locations and committed these crimes in person would face.
WebObjects 4.5 had support for both Objective-C and Java, if my memory's right. In WebObjects 5.0, support for Objective-C was dropped, because this was during the time when Apple Wanted You To Use Java.
Now, of course, it seems as though Apple Doesn't Want You To Use Java Anymore. Does this mean that WO6 will drop Java support, or at least bring back Objective-C?
My life? How is an anti-spyware tool on my computer going to really affect my life? Or how is my computer going to help me take control of my life?
I think his point is that computing doesn't have to be the hassle that it often is with Windows machines. Although I wouldn't recommend his particular distribution, his point is that there are platforms where you don't have to spend all that time just keeping your computer running properly. That's time you can reclaim and spend doing what you want, on the computer or elsewhere, rather than these mundane maintenance tasks.
In other words, he's not confusing his computer with real life. Quite the opposite, actually; he's saying that these are things you shouldn't have to deal with. One way or another, Microsoft forces you to deal with these things, either by spending time scanning for and removing spyware, or by not removing the spyware and suffering the performance and privacy consequences.
I am the one that gives it life, not the other way around.
Indeed, but what if you had a machine that could take care of itself, without the need for you to constantly poke and prod it just to 'give it life'?
Whatever operating system it runs doesn't really affect my life at all- I just use the thing.
Except that you don't "just use" it. Not if you're on Windows. The system is so bad -and many of the issues aren't just bugs but inherent design flaws that cannot be 'fixed' in the same way bugs can- that rather than just "reading e-mail and surfing for porn" you have to devote significant time to just keeping it working well enough to do those things. What if you had a system that Just Worked, where you didn't have to deal with these things, and where you really could be on the computer just for doing what you want to do?
Ethical fansubbers -those who take steps to halt distribution of their work after the series are licensed- do no harm to the anime industry, or if they do any harm at all then it far outweighs the good. Time and time again they have provided the industry with valuable predictors of what will sell in the US and what will not. They generate buzz as little else can.
Unethical fansubbers -those who continue to distribute their work after the series has been licensed, or worse still deliberately sub series which have already been licensed- usually only harm the industry. There are a few cases where there may be overriding moral concerns, for example subbing unedited versions of a series which was only released professionally in an edited form, but these are exceedingly few and far between. Episode 18 of Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou comes to mind: Gainax refused to license the unedited version, and so it was released edited. I've not actually seen fansubs of that series since it was licensed, however, and I know of no other immediately-obvious examples.
Digital fansubbing has, admittedly, been a problem. Before digisubs, it was more or less reasonable for a fansubber to assume that his or her work would no longer be distributed after a series was licensed. With digital fansubs, however, this is no longer true, and piracy has increased dramatically as a result. I remember in the early days of digisubs, when a group called the Techno-Girls refused to allow their work to be distributed digitally, citing piracy fears. At the time I called them elitist, and I stand by that accusation, but I must concede that their prediction was correct.
The thumb disc is neat, but for selecting a specific menu item, I frequently miss what I'm aiming for. In this case, you probably aren't yet used to a wheel which you can spin continuously. This can take a little getting used to, but the best advice I can give you is to slow down just a hair. What time you lose by moving a little more slowly you'll gain back by hitting what you want on the first try.
The best widget for operating the iPod would be something like the thumb wheel on the Sony Clie.
It doesn't work out so well in practice. That style of thumb wheel is great for very small lists. But when you get beyond about two screens' worth of items it becomes a hassle, because you can only move the wheel so far at one go before having to lift your thumb off of the wheel, move it back to the other end, and repeat the process. The result is that you choke up while scrolling through large lists, and DAP playlists tend to be very large indeed. The end result is that getting what you want from a large playlist is actually slower, despite the supposedly greater finesse one can use with the wheel.
The point of the iPod disc is that you can spin it continuously, which makes it better for a typical (i.e. fairly long) playlist than the limited dial.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "It's faster than the G4" and "We tried, but couldn't fit a G5 in it" don't you get?
The part where they didn't bother using their research and development to improve an elegant and clean architecture, as Apple has had a long history of doing in the past. Contrary to their marketing, IBM was more than capable of delivering the goods, as was shown barely a month after the initial announcement.
Not mine. I've no intention of going to Windows; I'll be using Linux. Not that Linux doesn't have its warts, but those can be worked around. I intend to work on addressing those issues, in the hope of toppling OSX's remaining advantages.
I've used Macs since 1984. It didn't matter that they were more expensive: they consistently used the best technology available, and this made them worth it. This is not the first time that Apple has stepped back from that -witness the switch to ATA drives over SCSI- but it is the final straw for me. I don't intend to move to Windows, anyway; it's Linux all the way for me.
By the way, the x86 switchover isn't the only reason I'm switching. The TPM module is another. Even if they'd stuck with a superior architecture, I refuse to use DRM-crippled hardware.
Well, what do you know. As Apple pushes the state of personal computing back by 20 years, it seems I was right all along: even with Jobs' relentless quest for cheap-over-good, Apple has no intention of passing the savings onto its userbase. Rather than improve an elegant architecture, they have chosen to go with Intel's cesspool because of a few marketing numbers, and the users will eat it up like candy.
Very well. I had hoped that Apple would take long enough to introduce these systems that I would at least be able to get one more purchase in, but I never anticipated needing a new machine this year, and this doesn't change that. It just means that I'm using my last Macs, instead of my second-to-last ones. If I'm going to be forced to use a garbage architecture like x86 in the future, I want to at least get my money's worth out of the machines I buy. With the move to Intel, particularly with the Apple tax intact as I knew it would be, Macs are no longer different enough from other personal computers to justify the price premium.
Whoah, hold on! Protecting the rights of the disabled is not, as you say, sinking to the lowest common denominator.
Might it be better to say that protecting the rights of the disabled need not be sinking to the lowest common denominator?
Most if not all accessibility standards can be implemented in ways which do not detract from the ability of those who don't require them work to the best of their abiliy. It would be difficult to argue, for example, that cutting a small ramp into a curb and sidewalk for those who can't step up onto it detracts from the ability of those who don't need the ramp to use the sidewalk or the road.
However, most of those standards can also be implemented in ways which do detract from the the experience fo. Going back to the curb example, if the ramp were to be built out from the curb rather than being cut into it, those using the road would face a small but very real obstacles at the points where the ramps were built. This would be more of an issue for wheeled vehicles than pedestrians, but it would affect a group negatively, and the point of accessibility is to not do that.
If Office were to support OpenDocument, then there would be no problem here: those who require the greater accessibility of Office could use it, while those who preferred OpenOffice.Org and didn't need Office for accessibility could use OOO. Last I checked, the law only mandates a file format, not what app is used to work with the files. As long as an app supports the standardized format, nothing else matters. It could be open-source or closed-source, made by Microsoft or Apple or some loose band of programmers, and it could support whatever other file formats the creators desired. As long as support for this particular format is somewhere on the list of features, nothing else matters, and that is as it should be.
Standards are protocols, not applications. Massachusetts understood this when they passed their OpenDocument law. It's not about screwing Microsoft over, though that may happen if MS continues to stubbornly refuse to support real standards. It's about making documents accessible and interoperable.
Open-Source is not socialism for one simple reason. Socialism, by definition, mandates sharing through force of law. Open-Source does not attempt to mandate anything through force of law, except that it stay shared itself.
The difference is key, because it makes Open-Source a choice, much like any other, and freedom of choice is what capitalism and individualism are all about. A truly socialist Open-Source license could probably be written -such a license would probably mandate that the user release all of his code as Open-Source, even if the user's apps take no code from any Open-Source applications- but I doubt that such a license would catch on.
The problem is that the Gecko team seems to have decided that CSS support is no longer a priority. Frankly, the big reason for this -as far as I can tell- is that they finally got bored with CSS and wanted to move on to implementing NEW, EXCITING standards like SVG which aren't seeing a lot of Web use yet, rather than the standards people are already using and want to use more.
I consider this to be a problem. Acid2 is horrible as actual testcases go, but as a benchmark it's a very important step, and the development team which once led the push for standards doesn't consider it a priority. This position brushes uncomfortably close to hypocrisy, given their loud (and completely justified) cry for standards support in browsers. New standards are good things. I have no intention of arguing otherwise, and I don't think most technical people would either. SVG will eventually be a very useful thing to have in a browser, and I don't think anyone is going to argue against that, but note the word eventually.
Isn't getting existing standards right more important than implementing new ones? To start on the new before perfecting the old sounds like a marketing-centric perspective, rather than a technology-centric one. This isn't even to say that marketing isn't important -it is- but the Gecko team should know better than to let marketing dictate what to prioritize. That's what led to Netscape 6 being released before Gecko had even reached the 1.0 stage, which is in turn what really drove the last nail into Netscape's reputation. Netscape 7 was a valiant attempt at reviving it, but by then it was too late.
I hope the Gecko team gets its priorities straight after the 1.5 release. I still use it on Windows, and I want to go back to Gecko other platforms. But they've rested on their standards-support laurels for too long; one of the other major engines (KHTML) has beaten them to the punch, and the second (Opera) is not far behind. Even the IE developers have announced that Acid2-compliance will eventually be coming to IE, though not in the IE7 release, but we have yet to hear any real commitment from the Gecko guys. This is -or should be- not just embarrassing, but outright humiliating for the Gecko team, and yet every time they're asked about it they either brush it off or get all defensive -even rude- about it.
It's the standards, stupid.
Article summary: Math is haaaaaard!
Seriously. As a battle-scarred veteran of Discrete Mathematics myself -a class I've mostly managed to repress the memory of- yes, math is hard, particularly in a class which takes skills you've taken for granted since forst grade, such as counting, and turns them on their ear. Engineering is hard to, largely because it requires mathematical skills. If you're not willing to put in the effort to learn, you're not going to do well.
News flash: Engineering is not for everyone. Clearly it wasn't for the author of this article. Perhaps something in our culture has shifted in ways which make fewer students amenable to challenging subjects. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case, though I've no clue as to how that would work.
Certainly the idea of regulating political Weblogs leaves a bad taste in my mouth. However, if you don't regulate them, then you've blown such a huge hole in campaign finance reform that you've essentially rendered it meaningless. The 2004 elections proved that rather handily.
So the real question is, is campaign finance reform worth it? Certainly it's a good concept, but if you have to severely restrict free speech in order to make it meaningful, is it worth doing at all? I'm not sure it is.
Java is a compiled language, even though it compiles to portable bytecode. Why, then, shouldn't Python also be considered compiled? The only real difference between the Java and Python methods -at least as far as this is concerned- is that Python makes the compilation process transparent.
Certainly there are many differences between Python and Java at the language level. When it comes to compilation, though, they're basically the same.
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?
That's exactly right. HR folks don't know much about computers, and so they can't simply test you; they wouldn't know what to do. But they do understand pieces of paper like diplomas and degrees as being important. Supposedly, certifications were created to translate technical knowledge into pieces of paper. Whether they actually serve that purpose or not is debatable.
It's quite possible to implement only the syndication part of Atom, offering the feed but not the API. If you do this, then Atom is no more of a security threat than RSS is. The only threat would be if the site were to inadvertently publish sensitive information, and this is an issue no matter what format you publish it in, be it Atom, RSS, HTML, or something else.
Even if you do implement the publication API, Atom includes features to address security concerns. As such, it is no more of a security risk than any of the other Weblog APIs out there.
That's the beauty of atom: although syndication and publication are closely related, you can implement them separately. Many services implement the syndication but not the publication already. Implementing the publication without the syndication would be pretty strange, but you could do it if you really wanted to.
One, the NWS predates AccuWeather, both in general and in terms of Web presence. So in this case it's the private sector competing against the government, not the reverse; AccuWeather is the newcomer. Are you suggesting that if some guy wants to provide a service which the government already performs, the government should simply stop providing that service so the guy can have a monopoly? Businesses have no inherent right to success in a capitalist system; they (ideally) earn their success by being better than the alternatives. AccuWeather is not trying to keep the government from starting a new service; it's trying to force the government to dismantle a service which existed long before they did. Whether the government ought to be providing that service in the first place may be a matter of debate, but it's beyond the scope of this question.
Two, others have already pointed out that AccuWeather does surprisingly little work of its own. It takes data collected at taxpayer expense, repackages it, and sells it. Certainly AccuWeather has the right to try doing this if they want, but what right to they have to say that the government shouldn't provide that same data to anyone else it wants? AccuWeather is not paying for this data; there is no contractual relationship between them and the government. If they want a contract, that's fine, but they should pay for it in that case; after all, one-sided contracts aren't valid.
Wait... do we LIKE XMLHttpRequest today, or do we HATE it? I can't keep track anymore.
"We" took it out of ActiveX so that it would be useful without the excess proprietary baggage. Now there are no legitimate reasons left to use it.
My tags should have the meaning I give them, more or less. If I use h1 as you suggest, the default h1-values will be mixed with my own values, and I have to think a bit harder.
You're a developer. Thinking is your job, so that the end user (be it the actual person or their user-agent) doesn't have to. You can reset the default h1-values to whatever you want. In most browsers, that means simply resetting font-family, font-size, and the margins, which odds are you would be doing anyway.
Almost all of the -moz sttributes correspond directly to attributes proposed for CSS3, and they're mostly implemented as per the current proposal. However, CSS3 has not been finalized, and there is a small but nonzero chance that these attributes will somehow change. If that were to happen, then (for example) opacity: might work one way on earlier versions of Mozilla and differently on later ones. This is a Bad Thing, because it prevents pages from degrading gracefully.
Using the -moz prefix avoids this problem. If the standard is finalized without any changes, then opacity: and -moz-opacity: can use the same code, and that will be that. If the standard changes, however, then opacity: can be implemented according to the new standard, -moz-opacity: can continue according to the old implementation (since it was never standardized anyway), and neither old nor new pages will break.
Incidentally, the CSS specs suggest exactly this solution, and I believe they actually use the -moz prefix as an example. KHTML and WebCore have a similar scheme, though they use a -khtml prefix. It would be nice if IE started using an -ie prefix in the future for its own stuff, though it seems unlikely that this will happen.
Why? I really don't understand this, what's wrong with divs?
Nothing is inherently wrong with divs, as long as you keep in mind that divs don't mean anything, and that a meaningful tag is always preferable when one is available.
To illustrate this, let's look at some common page-design tasks. Suppose that you want your page's title (which you'll type in text) and an image to appear at the top of your page. Many people would tell you to use a div with an id of 'head' to wrap everything, but there's a better way: simply use an h1 tag and give it a background and background-image. By using a meaningful tag for your page header, you've cut out excess HTML code, and the result is more elegant.
Let's say, however, that you want more than just text and an image in your header. Suppose, for example,that you want to do something like Slashdot, using text, an image, and more images representing the last several categories that have been updated. There is no one tag that can encompass all of this, and so here we have a case where a div is appropriate. Give it a meaningful ID -'header' is a common choice- and put your header elements inside it.
The rule for elegant code is to use the most meaningful tags which will do what you want. DIV tags are suitable when nothing else is available, and there are times when that happens. However, they should not be used when better tags exist.
Consider games like this, which could never have worked on any of the other systems. This is simply the continuation of something that started with Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles - the creation of games which wouldn't work well with only one screen per player. It's a new gameplay mechanic, and it's still being explored, so there aren't too many good games with it yet. This game, however, sounds like the latest in a handful of solid hits.
Unusual? Yes. Gimmicky? I don't think so.
Apple has several APIs which allow access to Aqua. C and C++ are typically expected to use Carbon, but Apple has been doing some interesting things recently with calling Cocoa from otherwise-Carbon code.
I want to see Acid2 compliance.
I understand that Acid2 is not the be-all and end-all of CSS testing. However, I think it's difficult to deny that it is an important benchmark, and Firefox is seriously behind the pack. WebCore, KHTML, and Opera have already managed this in their development code (with the WebCore and KHTML engines already available to the public), and iCab has a compliant release version already. No news yet on IE7, but at this rate Gecko faces a real chance of being dead last to get Acid2 compliance among the major browser engines. That's just sad.
Again, I understand that Acid2 is not the be-all and end-all of CSS compliance testing. In fact, as test cases go, it's not even all that great. However, it's difficult to deny its importance as a benchmark, and the Gecko crew is getting some pretty serious egg on its face here.
It's not my intent to bash Firefox. I'm an avid Firefox fan on Mac, Windows, and Linux alike. I think it gets a lot of things right. But I also think that in this case, they're getting their priorities wrong.
Hold the hacker personally liable for all damage which results, in both civil and criminal senses.
On the civil side, the cracker/author/whatever could be sued to recover any financial damages, on a first-come first-served basis. The one catch here is that only actual damages may be awarded in a case, rather than punitive damages. This is not so much to protect the author from further financial harm, since all of his assets are likely to be drained anyway, but more to ensure that as many bodies as possible can recoup whatever damage is incurred.
On the criminal side, the author is considered to have directly caused all damage resulting from the virus. The crimes are not considered premeditated unless the virus or hack specifically targeted a person or group for damage. In any case, these charges will almost certainly include many counts of theft and/or fraud, but could even include manslaughter if actual deaths result. If police departments or courthouses are hit, then the charges might also include obstruction of justice.
This law does not bring the death penalty into things (unless you can somehow bring up a premeditated murder charge, which would be quite difficult), but it does no more or less than hold the author/cracker/whatever responsible for the consequences of his or her actions. The sentences for such things are likely to sound outrageous and extreme, but they would in fact be no more than what a person who travelled to all of these locations and committed these crimes in person would face.
WebObjects 4.5 had support for both Objective-C and Java, if my memory's right. In WebObjects 5.0, support for Objective-C was dropped, because this was during the time when Apple Wanted You To Use Java.
Now, of course, it seems as though Apple Doesn't Want You To Use Java Anymore. Does this mean that WO6 will drop Java support, or at least bring back Objective-C?
My life? How is an anti-spyware tool on my computer going to really affect my life? Or how is my computer going to help me take control of my life?
I think his point is that computing doesn't have to be the hassle that it often is with Windows machines. Although I wouldn't recommend his particular distribution, his point is that there are platforms where you don't have to spend all that time just keeping your computer running properly. That's time you can reclaim and spend doing what you want, on the computer or elsewhere, rather than these mundane maintenance tasks.
In other words, he's not confusing his computer with real life. Quite the opposite, actually; he's saying that these are things you shouldn't have to deal with. One way or another, Microsoft forces you to deal with these things, either by spending time scanning for and removing spyware, or by not removing the spyware and suffering the performance and privacy consequences.
I am the one that gives it life, not the other way around.
Indeed, but what if you had a machine that could take care of itself, without the need for you to constantly poke and prod it just to 'give it life'?
Whatever operating system it runs doesn't really affect my life at all- I just use the thing.
Except that you don't "just use" it. Not if you're on Windows. The system is so bad -and many of the issues aren't just bugs but inherent design flaws that cannot be 'fixed' in the same way bugs can- that rather than just "reading e-mail and surfing for porn" you have to devote significant time to just keeping it working well enough to do those things. What if you had a system that Just Worked, where you didn't have to deal with these things, and where you really could be on the computer just for doing what you want to do?
That is his point.
Ethical fansubbers -those who take steps to halt distribution of their work after the series are licensed- do no harm to the anime industry, or if they do any harm at all then it far outweighs the good. Time and time again they have provided the industry with valuable predictors of what will sell in the US and what will not. They generate buzz as little else can.
Unethical fansubbers -those who continue to distribute their work after the series has been licensed, or worse still deliberately sub series which have already been licensed- usually only harm the industry. There are a few cases where there may be overriding moral concerns, for example subbing unedited versions of a series which was only released professionally in an edited form, but these are exceedingly few and far between. Episode 18 of Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou comes to mind: Gainax refused to license the unedited version, and so it was released edited. I've not actually seen fansubs of that series since it was licensed, however, and I know of no other immediately-obvious examples.
Digital fansubbing has, admittedly, been a problem. Before digisubs, it was more or less reasonable for a fansubber to assume that his or her work would no longer be distributed after a series was licensed. With digital fansubs, however, this is no longer true, and piracy has increased dramatically as a result. I remember in the early days of digisubs, when a group called the Techno-Girls refused to allow their work to be distributed digitally, citing piracy fears. At the time I called them elitist, and I stand by that accusation, but I must concede that their prediction was correct.
The thumb disc is neat, but for selecting a specific menu item, I frequently miss what I'm aiming for.
In this case, you probably aren't yet used to a wheel which you can spin continuously. This can take a little getting used to, but the best advice I can give you is to slow down just a hair. What time you lose by moving a little more slowly you'll gain back by hitting what you want on the first try.
The best widget for operating the iPod would be something like the thumb wheel on the Sony Clie.
It doesn't work out so well in practice. That style of thumb wheel is great for very small lists. But when you get beyond about two screens' worth of items it becomes a hassle, because you can only move the wheel so far at one go before having to lift your thumb off of the wheel, move it back to the other end, and repeat the process. The result is that you choke up while scrolling through large lists, and DAP playlists tend to be very large indeed. The end result is that getting what you want from a large playlist is actually slower, despite the supposedly greater finesse one can use with the wheel.
The point of the iPod disc is that you can spin it continuously, which makes it better for a typical (i.e. fairly long) playlist than the limited dial.