...such a pity. But then, Every's always been a blind zealot. I went through my own blind-zealot phase, and everything I learned, I learned from him. No joke; I usedto visit his site every day looking for new articles. It was only later that I realized just how inaccurate he was. Incidentally, I'm still a Mac user. I'm just not blind about it anymore, and no longer have the "Not Invented at Apple Before 1995 = BAD" mentality that Every seems to maintain.
He's also a massive OS9 whiner, often deriding things in OSX just because they're not the exact same thing as they were in OS9. But let's look deeper into this. The big inaccuracy with this article is the assertion that Apple had Carbon working on NuKernel (spelled with an e, not an a) many years ago. False. Copland, rather like OSX, had a completely new API (Taligent), and used a virtual machine known as the Compatibility Box to run System 7 apps. Copland had no notion of anything like Carbon.
...but at the same time, Pepper was a damn nice editor, for a wide variety of reasons. While I suppose there is no moral imperative for him to open the code, it would still be A Really Nice Thing To Do, particularly if he doesn't intend on developing it any further or making any more money off of it.
But it's his prerogative, I suppose. Still, it's a shame. He could have really helped advance the state of the art, given a few of his ideas. Or at the absolute least he could have handed off the code to someone else so that people who depend on the program (like me) could count on it still being actively developed.
OK, people, listen up...
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
I think that basically everyone here knows that haiku are a Japanese are, not Chinese. The bit about Chinese spammers forging the haiku have nothing to do with that.
China doesn't respect international copyright laws. That's one of the reasons it got its own region in the DVD region code scheme; piracy is both rampant and completely legal there.
That's why they would be the ones most likely to forge the haiku; it would be legal there.
Yeah, it's probably redundant, but I figured I might be able to use my bonus to bump it a bit higher...
Basically, it seems to me as though from a marketing perspective, they want to force us to not ignore ads. A "good ad" is one that cannot be ignored.
They are missing the point of marketing entirely. A "good ad" is one we don't ignore because we don't want to ignore it, but because we're forced to not ignore it. That's always been a basic maxim of marketing; you're selling the product, and alienating your viewers does not serve that purpose.
Seen this way, pop-up (and popover) ads become nothing more than the last refuge of the talentless hack who can't make a decent advertisement to save his life, so he instead forces people to view it.
The anatomy of an effective ad on the Net right now is changing. Google has the right idea with its AdWords. A good ad doesn't take a lot of bandwidth and isn't intrusive, but still manages to intrigue the user. They're integrated well into the page, so they still manage to Look Good. That's the type of ad I would check out. Text-based ads also have the advantage that even though they take almost no time to download over even the slowest modems, they cannot be blocked because they're part of the page, rather than a separate entity. You might theoretically be able to hack around your user CSS file, but thhat would be the only way, and even then you wouldn't save any bandwidth.
More people who think it's actually acceptable to have "python" and "PYTHON" subdirectories in the same dir.
Two words which differ only in case are pronounced exactly the same way, at least in English (but also in most other language which have a concept of letter case). That's the only real determining factor. Grammar is meaningless when dealing with filenames, so capital vs. lowercase loses any real value. Thus, case-insensitive should be taken to rule the day, bec ause it more accurately reflects the way people think about filenames.
Or, to put it another way, what is the difference between "Mary had a little lamb" and "mary had a little lamb"? Most people would say there is none, and indeed, given the massive number of people who don't use capitals in their e-mails anymore, there's some credence to that claim. If people don't care about whether things are capital or lowercase on a computer, then why should the computer itself care either?
While what you say is all well and good, how do you justify putting corporate corruption in the same classification as the mob? You can't just arbitrarily assign something to a class of crime because you think the punishment is appropriate, after all. Unless you can give some real justification, it just won't fly.
Or we could continue down the Merrie American Path and build dirty-but-cheap power plants right on the Canadian border, so that the prevailing winds dump the smog in Canadia, thereby poisoning their children instead of our own. After all, better Them than Us, right?It's kind of hard to do that in California, though. It shares no border with Canada.
It's sad, how little geography is taught in American public schools anymore...
DigitalConsumer.org...
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
DigitalConsumer's Consumer Technology Bill of Rights is an interesting start, but it is not strongly worded enough (it only grants rights, rather than guaranteeing them). I'd amend it to something like this (minus parenthetical comments, and including similar wording for other rights as needed):
1) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work at any time. (time-shifting) 2) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work at any place. (space-shifting) 3) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from creating copies of that work strictly for archival purposes. (backup) 4) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work via any medium, nor on any computing platform. (interoperability) 5) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from transforming that work into another form, though they may be prohibited from modifying that work in any way other than those necessary for such transformation. (compatibility) 6) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work may have other rights not enumerated in this document, to be determined by the courts. When such a right is determined, then legitimate users must thenceforth not be prohibited from exercising that right. This document should then be amended to enumerate that right. (This is the most important thing: the rights must not be limited by any law passed). 7) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from taking technological steps to secure any of the rights enumerated in this document, nor any others which may be enumerated in the future. (circumvention for fair use, as in reverse-engineering)
Some of the questions are certainly a matter of grave concern. In particular, those which revolved around actual science.
Some of the others, however, such as the belief in pseudoscience, I'm not sure are as alarming. Is this really a disbelief in science, or simply a turning away from something I call "scientific exclusivism"?
Allow me to explain. Science, logic, empiricism, and the like are very good at explaining stuff. In fact, you can explain a whole lot of things with these. But you cannot explain everything with them; there are holes. And there are holes in every school of thought out there; the universe is just plain not simple enough to allow for a single set of principles to explain all things. So to fill in those gaps, something else is needed. And whatever this "something else" is, it has its own holes, ones filled in by science. They complement each other, rather than conflict.
Also interesting to note is the conflicts you see in any exclusivist system. A religious fundamentalist will blithely ignore what he sees every day, in an attempt to justify his own beliefs. But a militant atheist will weave together a maze of logic which, in the end, contradicts itself, usually by an assumption that lack of proof positive equals proof negative. And then there's Objectivism, but going into the exclusivist errors in that one will take more time than I currently have. In the end, though, it all goes back to Goedel's theorem that no system of methematics can be both consistent and complete at the same time. It's true for schools of thought as well; if you want to be truly consistent in your beliefs, then it is impossible to stick with only one.
There has been a growing trend among academia for scientific exclusivism lately, that is, the idea that science can explain all things and anything else is ridiculous superstition. This bothers me; in its own way, it is as bad as any religion, and breeds the same sorts of intolerance (albeit with different targets). If this test shows a trend away from exclusivism -be it scientific, religious, philosophical, or whatever- then someone is doing something right for a change.
It's fairly simple. Use JPEG for photos, where the compression artifacts won't be noticeable and the bandwidth savings are most helpful. Use PNG for computer-generated stuff like screenshots, and run them though pngcrush (always use the highest compression for PNG's that you make available for download; because they're lossless, you don't lose any quality).
...but if 9/11 has convinced him to trade his life for the freedom that makes it worth living, then he is nothing but a coward.
I pity the company he controls, for being under the thumb of someone like him. I can only hope they find a way to boot him out before he drags them down (or worse, succeeds in his mad scheme). If I have anything to say about it, he'll never see a dollar of mine; I'd sooner give it to Microsoft now.
I would agree to this, if it were explicitly stated that the companies were legally required to refuse the information if a specific warrant is not shown to the company.
That's just it. The FBI can search whatever the heck of mine they want, if they show me a warrant first. No sooner.
isn't it easier and faster to look at the filename than metadata and file contents?? Not in a modern interface, it isn't. And it's also far too easy to screw things up; a file's association shouldn't change just because its name does. Storing immutable data like association in a mutable location like the filename is a hack that should never have been used. It's a great shame to the industry that it ever was.
But then, that's Microsoft for you. Pushing inferior standards onto everyone else.
We understand that the success of a licensing program relies on the success of the underlying technology.
They don't get it. In fact, they have it backwards. The success of a technology depends on the success of its licensing: if no one will buy it, it won't succeed. This is what killed Beta. It's also what relegated Macs to the niche they're in now. And now, it may do the same to MPEG-4.
1) Do not use Flash for navigation. Or if you do, be sure to provide some alternate means of navigating as well. No one should have to download plug-ins just to navigate the site.
2) Keep your page size down. Most users are still behind modems. As a corollary, don't use graphics just to have graphics; put them there with a purpose in mind.
3) Make your pages validate. Just a quick run through Tidy will fix this up for you. I'm not saying you necessarily have to use structure HTML (I think you [i]should, [/i]but that's not as important as plain old validation). The Slash authors would do well to take this one to heart.
4) Don't open any new windows, except in response to clicking links, and only do this very sparingly. Popups are annoying.
5) Automatic music = BAD. Embed music if you want, but provide a PLAY, and more importantly, a STOP button. This means no using the evil IE-specific BGSOUND tag.
6) Unless you're trying to show off your m@d j@\/A$kr1p7 $k1Llz, don't use it unnecessarily. Be particularly careful with dialog bozes and alerts.
7) Visit AnyBrowser, A List Apart, and the old WebStandards.org sites. While these latter two sometimes miss the point of standards-compliance (it's not just about neat tricks, though you certainly can do these), it's important to at least get the page legible in anything you throw at it, even if the design doesn't look right in some of them. In the end, design is nice, but the information is what's really important.
7) Speaking of that last one, don't let the design get in the way of your information. Grey text on a white background is a Bad Idea. So is anything that's blinking. And so on, and so forth.
That's not the fault of CSS. It's the fault of idiots who abuse stylesheets by specifying absolute font sizes (which even the W3C says not to do), and of browser makers who don't have the guts to break those sizes by making font-zooming bump these sizes proportionally.
Alistapart isn't the model of accessibility; you're right (they have [i]browser[/i]-accessibility down pretty good but not font-size accessibility).
That's correct. So don't listen to stuff you don't like. You don't get it; no one can force you to listen to anything, no matter how hard they try. If worst comes to worst, you can still just plain not pay attention. And yes, you can do this.
I deplore hate speech as much as the next person. In fact, I may have the occasion to deplore it even more. But if speech is to be free, then all speech must be free; even garbage like this. You cannot take the good without taking the bad.
Laws like this are supposed to "protect human dignity." Shame they're self-defeating. The second you limit the human mind -as you do by limiting speech, the way by which ideas are propagated- you have diminished the very thing which makes us human, and thus the laws meant to protect human dignity, actually destroy human dignity.
For all of Brin's Pollyanaism, he forgets one critical thing: a land without privacy is a land ruled byy blackmail. One where people are forced to conform for fear of ostracism, and no hope of release for any individuality. Rather ironic, actually; he doesn't see the bars of the cage he would construct for us.
No-cache isn't used to increase ad impressions. In fact, most browsers ignore the tag when it comes to Forward/Back buttons; they cache in memory (i.e. for the session) but not to disk. This is, in fact, what browsers are supposed to do?
Why is it there, then? It's there for inherently dynamic content, messageboards being the best example. Even if you only look away from one of these for a minute, it could change as new posts are added. So when you load up an old copy, it's not very likely to accurately reflect the thread anymore. So caching such content would actually be harmful. This is the reason for the no-cache tag. It doesn't increase ad impressions at all, except possibly on OmniWeb, and that is because of a problem with that particular browser.
Nothing wrong with patents in general. However, there are several problems with the current implementation. Namely, that it's far too open to abuse.
The biggest problem by far is that corporate patents are not "use it or lose it", like trademarks are. This allows corporations to essentially kill any products that might compete with them by simply buying the patent and never using it ot licensing it to anyone. The energy industry is particularly guilty of this, and has been known to be doing this for years.
Then, of course, there's the length. While seventeen years was a decent amount of time in past years, when the pace of technology moved fairly slowly in general, in this world they last far too long. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, but not at the cost of competition. They need to be shortened to ten years at the longest, to fit the current state of technological advancement.
And finally, of course, the ability to patent software. Software is a written work, not a device (if anything is a device, it is the computer itself, but that is not software). The difference is basically the same as copyrighting a novel and patenting an entire genre. What if Tolkien had patented fantasy? It sounds absurd, but this is exactly what is going on in the software industry. Copyright provides adequate protection against stealing one's work in this case; there is no need for patents. never mind that you're not supposed to be able to patent math problems anyway, but the corporate whores in Congress seem to have ignored this for the time being.
Besides which, open patents should all be royalty-free; that's the critical part of why they are open. If you want to patent something, that's fine, but you shouldn't be allowed to charge for it if you want it to become part of an open standard.
Patents aren't bad in and of themselves. But they've been abused, most commonly in the software industry but others as well, for many years now. The system needs to be reformed to prevent this.
The Desktop, as such, makes perfect sense. At least in the OS9 concept, it was meant to be a space higher than even the drives on the system, from which you could start your search on any of the drives. This was great. No meaningless drive letters like in DOS, and no confusion of one drive not being in the same place as all the others (in Linux, this would be / for the boot drive, and/mnt for the other drives).
OSX abandons this. I wouldn't mind that, but they need to do a better job of hiding it, at least in the GUI (and to be honest, it would be better in the CLI as well). I have my own thoughts as to how that might be doable, but I suppose that's for another post. It can certainly be done without breaking POSIX-correctness; it's really just a minor tweak to how the filesystem layout would be shown. But that's for another time, really; I'm trying to make mock-ups of how it could work, and I couldn't put those here anyway.
Get a warrant. I'll show you anything you want to see, but show me your goddamn warrant first. Until you have it, you have no right whatsoever to search my, or anyone else's computer. I don't care what your reason is. This is not acceptable.
This sounds like a start toward OS-neutral video, but until companies decide not to add proprietary layers making otherwise widely-available formats unavailable, it won't be the end. Um, the QuickTime file format is the standard file format for MPEG-4 (at least, according to the MPEG group's standard). You can find free documentation for it at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/2160/ fformats/fformats.htm; look in the "Animation" section.
The QuickTime codecs are proprietary, true, as is Apple's own implementation. But the QuickTime file format isn't.
Let's face it: the only reason indows is at the top is because Microsoft lied to the public, who didn't know enough to see through the transparent fraud that Microsoft has committed over the years. Because of this, they believe M$'s lies about performance, compatibility, stnadards-compliance, and such.
So raise a generation to know better, and Microsoft will be relegated to the oblivion it so richly deserves.
Slashdot Mirror
...such a pity. But then, Every's always been a blind zealot. I went through my own blind-zealot phase, and everything I learned, I learned from him. No joke; I usedto visit his site every day looking for new articles. It was only later that I realized just how inaccurate he was. Incidentally, I'm still a Mac user. I'm just not blind about it anymore, and no longer have the "Not Invented at Apple Before 1995 = BAD" mentality that Every seems to maintain.
He's also a massive OS9 whiner, often deriding things in OSX just because they're not the exact same thing as they were in OS9. But let's look deeper into this. The big inaccuracy with this article is the assertion that Apple had Carbon working on NuKernel (spelled with an e, not an a) many years ago. False. Copland, rather like OSX, had a completely new API (Taligent), and used a virtual machine known as the Compatibility Box to run System 7 apps. Copland had no notion of anything like Carbon.
...but at the same time, Pepper was a damn nice editor, for a wide variety of reasons. While I suppose there is no moral imperative for him to open the code, it would still be A Really Nice Thing To Do, particularly if he doesn't intend on developing it any further or making any more money off of it.
But it's his prerogative, I suppose. Still, it's a shame. He could have really helped advance the state of the art, given a few of his ideas. Or at the absolute least he could have handed off the code to someone else so that people who depend on the program (like me) could count on it still being actively developed.
I think that basically everyone here knows that haiku are a Japanese are, not Chinese. The bit about Chinese spammers forging the haiku have nothing to do with that.
China doesn't respect international copyright laws. That's one of the reasons it got its own region in the DVD region code scheme; piracy is both rampant and completely legal there.
That's why they would be the ones most likely to forge the haiku; it would be legal there.
Yeah, it's probably redundant, but I figured I might be able to use my bonus to bump it a bit higher...
That article was fascinating.
Basically, it seems to me as though from a marketing perspective, they want to force us to not ignore ads. A "good ad" is one that cannot be ignored.
They are missing the point of marketing entirely. A "good ad" is one we don't ignore because we don't want to ignore it, but because we're forced to not ignore it. That's always been a basic maxim of marketing; you're selling the product, and alienating your viewers does not serve that purpose.
Seen this way, pop-up (and popover) ads become nothing more than the last refuge of the talentless hack who can't make a decent advertisement to save his life, so he instead forces people to view it.
The anatomy of an effective ad on the Net right now is changing. Google has the right idea with its AdWords. A good ad doesn't take a lot of bandwidth and isn't intrusive, but still manages to intrigue the user. They're integrated well into the page, so they still manage to Look Good. That's the type of ad I would check out. Text-based ads also have the advantage that even though they take almost no time to download over even the slowest modems, they cannot be blocked because they're part of the page, rather than a separate entity. You might theoretically be able to hack around your user CSS file, but thhat would be the only way, and even then you wouldn't save any bandwidth.
Here's an example of an a text-based ad system that works. Open-Source, too; nice bonus.
More people who think it's actually acceptable to have "python" and "PYTHON" subdirectories in the same dir.
Two words which differ only in case are pronounced exactly the same way, at least in English (but also in most other language which have a concept of letter case). That's the only real determining factor. Grammar is meaningless when dealing with filenames, so capital vs. lowercase loses any real value. Thus, case-insensitive should be taken to rule the day, bec ause it more accurately reflects the way people think about filenames.
Or, to put it another way, what is the difference between "Mary had a little lamb" and "mary had a little lamb"? Most people would say there is none, and indeed, given the massive number of people who don't use capitals in their e-mails anymore, there's some credence to that claim. If people don't care about whether things are capital or lowercase on a computer, then why should the computer itself care either?
While what you say is all well and good, how do you justify putting corporate corruption in the same classification as the mob? You can't just arbitrarily assign something to a class of crime because you think the punishment is appropriate, after all. Unless you can give some real justification, it just won't fly.
Or we could continue down the Merrie American Path and build dirty-but-cheap power plants right on the Canadian border, so that the prevailing winds dump the smog in Canadia, thereby poisoning their children instead of our own. After all, better Them than Us, right?It's kind of hard to do that in California, though. It shares no border with Canada.
It's sad, how little geography is taught in American public schools anymore...
DigitalConsumer's Consumer Technology Bill of Rights is an interesting start, but it is not strongly worded enough (it only grants rights, rather than guaranteeing them). I'd amend it to something like this (minus parenthetical comments, and including similar wording for other rights as needed):
1) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work at any time. (time-shifting)
2) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work at any place. (space-shifting)
3) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from creating copies of that work strictly for archival purposes. (backup)
4) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work via any medium, nor on any computing platform. (interoperability)
5) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from transforming that work into another form, though they may be prohibited from modifying that work in any way other than those necessary for such transformation. (compatibility)
6) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work may have other rights not enumerated in this document, to be determined by the courts. When such a right is determined, then legitimate users must thenceforth not be prohibited from exercising that right. This document should then be amended to enumerate that right. (This is the most important thing: the rights must not be limited by any law passed).
7) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from taking technological steps to secure any of the rights enumerated in this document, nor any others which may be enumerated in the future. (circumvention for fair use, as in reverse-engineering)
Every time you listen to a copy-protected CD...
Celine Dion kills an iMac.
Please, think of the iMacs.
Some of the questions are certainly a matter of grave concern. In particular, those which revolved around actual science.
Some of the others, however, such as the belief in pseudoscience, I'm not sure are as alarming. Is this really a disbelief in science, or simply a turning away from something I call "scientific exclusivism"?
Allow me to explain. Science, logic, empiricism, and the like are very good at explaining stuff. In fact, you can explain a whole lot of things with these. But you cannot explain everything with them; there are holes. And there are holes in every school of thought out there; the universe is just plain not simple enough to allow for a single set of principles to explain all things. So to fill in those gaps, something else is needed. And whatever this "something else" is, it has its own holes, ones filled in by science. They complement each other, rather than conflict.
Also interesting to note is the conflicts you see in any exclusivist system. A religious fundamentalist will blithely ignore what he sees every day, in an attempt to justify his own beliefs. But a militant atheist will weave together a maze of logic which, in the end, contradicts itself, usually by an assumption that lack of proof positive equals proof negative. And then there's Objectivism, but going into the exclusivist errors in that one will take more time than I currently have. In the end, though, it all goes back to Goedel's theorem that no system of methematics can be both consistent and complete at the same time. It's true for schools of thought as well; if you want to be truly consistent in your beliefs, then it is impossible to stick with only one.
There has been a growing trend among academia for scientific exclusivism lately, that is, the idea that science can explain all things and anything else is ridiculous superstition. This bothers me; in its own way, it is as bad as any religion, and breeds the same sorts of intolerance (albeit with different targets). If this test shows a trend away from exclusivism -be it scientific, religious, philosophical, or whatever- then someone is doing something right for a change.
It's fairly simple. Use JPEG for photos, where the compression artifacts won't be noticeable and the bandwidth savings are most helpful. Use PNG for computer-generated stuff like screenshots, and run them though pngcrush (always use the highest compression for PNG's that you make available for download; because they're lossless, you don't lose any quality).
Has this become uncommon knowledge already?
...but if 9/11 has convinced him to trade his life for the freedom that makes it worth living, then he is nothing but a coward.
I pity the company he controls, for being under the thumb of someone like him. I can only hope they find a way to boot him out before he drags them down (or worse, succeeds in his mad scheme). If I have anything to say about it, he'll never see a dollar of mine; I'd sooner give it to Microsoft now.
...but only on one condition.
I would agree to this, if it were explicitly stated that the companies were legally required to refuse the information if a specific warrant is not shown to the company.
That's just it. The FBI can search whatever the heck of mine they want, if they show me a warrant first. No sooner.
isn't it easier and faster to look at the filename than metadata and file contents??
Not in a modern interface, it isn't. And it's also far too easy to screw things up; a file's association shouldn't change just because its name does. Storing immutable data like association in a mutable location like the filename is a hack that should never have been used. It's a great shame to the industry that it ever was.
But then, that's Microsoft for you. Pushing inferior standards onto everyone else.
We understand that the success of a licensing program relies on the success of the underlying technology.
They don't get it. In fact, they have it backwards. The success of a technology depends on the success of its licensing: if no one will buy it, it won't succeed. This is what killed Beta. It's also what relegated Macs to the niche they're in now. And now, it may do the same to MPEG-4.
1) Do not use Flash for navigation. Or if you do, be sure to provide some alternate means of navigating as well. No one should have to download plug-ins just to navigate the site.
2) Keep your page size down. Most users are still behind modems. As a corollary, don't use graphics just to have graphics; put them there with a purpose in mind.
3) Make your pages validate. Just a quick run through Tidy will fix this up for you. I'm not saying you necessarily have to use structure HTML (I think you [i]should, [/i]but that's not as important as plain old validation). The Slash authors would do well to take this one to heart.
4) Don't open any new windows, except in response to clicking links, and only do this very sparingly. Popups are annoying.
5) Automatic music = BAD. Embed music if you want, but provide a PLAY, and more importantly, a STOP button. This means no using the evil IE-specific BGSOUND tag.
6) Unless you're trying to show off your m@d j@\/A$kr1p7 $k1Llz, don't use it unnecessarily. Be particularly careful with dialog bozes and alerts.
7) Visit AnyBrowser, A List Apart, and the old WebStandards.org sites. While these latter two sometimes miss the point of standards-compliance (it's not just about neat tricks, though you certainly can do these), it's important to at least get the page legible in anything you throw at it, even if the design doesn't look right in some of them. In the end, design is nice, but the information is what's really important.
7) Speaking of that last one, don't let the design get in the way of your information. Grey text on a white background is a Bad Idea. So is anything that's blinking. And so on, and so forth.
That's not the fault of CSS. It's the fault of idiots who abuse stylesheets by specifying absolute font sizes (which even the W3C says not to do), and of browser makers who don't have the guts to break those sizes by making font-zooming bump these sizes proportionally.
Alistapart isn't the model of accessibility; you're right (they have [i]browser[/i]-accessibility down pretty good but not font-size accessibility).
CSS is not ruining the Web. Bad designers are.
That's correct. So don't listen to stuff you don't like. You don't get it; no one can force you to listen to anything, no matter how hard they try. If worst comes to worst, you can still just plain not pay attention. And yes, you can do this.
I deplore hate speech as much as the next person. In fact, I may have the occasion to deplore it even more. But if speech is to be free, then all speech must be free; even garbage like this. You cannot take the good without taking the bad.
Laws like this are supposed to "protect human dignity." Shame they're self-defeating. The second you limit the human mind -as you do by limiting speech, the way by which ideas are propagated- you have diminished the very thing which makes us human, and thus the laws meant to protect human dignity, actually destroy human dignity.
For all of Brin's Pollyanaism, he forgets one critical thing: a land without privacy is a land ruled byy blackmail. One where people are forced to conform for fear of ostracism, and no hope of release for any individuality. Rather ironic, actually; he doesn't see the bars of the cage he would construct for us.
No-cache isn't used to increase ad impressions. In fact, most browsers ignore the tag when it comes to Forward/Back buttons; they cache in memory (i.e. for the session) but not to disk. This is, in fact, what browsers are supposed to do?
Why is it there, then? It's there for inherently dynamic content, messageboards being the best example. Even if you only look away from one of these for a minute, it could change as new posts are added. So when you load up an old copy, it's not very likely to accurately reflect the thread anymore. So caching such content would actually be harmful. This is the reason for the no-cache tag. It doesn't increase ad impressions at all, except possibly on OmniWeb, and that is because of a problem with that particular browser.
Nothing wrong with patents in general. However, there are several problems with the current implementation. Namely, that it's far too open to abuse.
The biggest problem by far is that corporate patents are not "use it or lose it", like trademarks are. This allows corporations to essentially kill any products that might compete with them by simply buying the patent and never using it ot licensing it to anyone. The energy industry is particularly guilty of this, and has been known to be doing this for years.
Then, of course, there's the length. While seventeen years was a decent amount of time in past years, when the pace of technology moved fairly slowly in general, in this world they last far too long. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, but not at the cost of competition. They need to be shortened to ten years at the longest, to fit the current state of technological advancement.
And finally, of course, the ability to patent software. Software is a written work, not a device (if anything is a device, it is the computer itself, but that is not software). The difference is basically the same as copyrighting a novel and patenting an entire genre. What if Tolkien had patented fantasy? It sounds absurd, but this is exactly what is going on in the software industry. Copyright provides adequate protection against stealing one's work in this case; there is no need for patents. never mind that you're not supposed to be able to patent math problems anyway, but the corporate whores in Congress seem to have ignored this for the time being.
Besides which, open patents should all be royalty-free; that's the critical part of why they are open. If you want to patent something, that's fine, but you shouldn't be allowed to charge for it if you want it to become part of an open standard.
Patents aren't bad in and of themselves. But they've been abused, most commonly in the software industry but others as well, for many years now. The system needs to be reformed to prevent this.
The Desktop, as such, makes perfect sense. At least in the OS9 concept, it was meant to be a space higher than even the drives on the system, from which you could start your search on any of the drives. This was great. No meaningless drive letters like in DOS, and no confusion of one drive not being in the same place as all the others (in Linux, this would be / for the boot drive, and /mnt for the other drives).
OSX abandons this. I wouldn't mind that, but they need to do a better job of hiding it, at least in the GUI (and to be honest, it would be better in the CLI as well). I have my own thoughts as to how that might be doable, but I suppose that's for another post. It can certainly be done without breaking POSIX-correctness; it's really just a minor tweak to how the filesystem layout would be shown. But that's for another time, really; I'm trying to make mock-ups of how it could work, and I couldn't put those here anyway.
Look, guys. It's simple.
Get a warrant. I'll show you anything you want to see, but show me your goddamn warrant first. Until you have it, you have no right whatsoever to search my, or anyone else's computer. I don't care what your reason is. This is not acceptable.
This sounds like a start toward OS-neutral video, but until companies decide not to add proprietary layers making otherwise widely-available formats unavailable, it won't be the end./ fformats/fformats.htm; look in the "Animation" section.
Um, the QuickTime file format is the standard file format for MPEG-4 (at least, according to the MPEG group's standard). You can find free documentation for it at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/2160
The QuickTime codecs are proprietary, true, as is Apple's own implementation. But the QuickTime file format isn't.
Teach them on something superior to indows.
Let's face it: the only reason indows is at the top is because Microsoft lied to the public, who didn't know enough to see through the transparent fraud that Microsoft has committed over the years. Because of this, they believe M$'s lies about performance, compatibility, stnadards-compliance, and such.
So raise a generation to know better, and Microsoft will be relegated to the oblivion it so richly deserves.